Figure 2.

A real-time automated multiple whiskers tracking. A, Pixy data from D1 and D2 whiskers (left, raw and smoothed) or β and γ whiskers (right, smoothed), as a mouse performs five auditory go-cue-triggered trials. A mouse moves a whisker into contact with a piezo-film sensor (bottom). Contact with the sensor triggers a reward. The cue onset and the reward trigger times are marked below the whiskers movement traces. Note that the spatial location of the D1 and D2 whiskers is distinct; the position of the two whiskers rarely overlap. In these trials, the distance between the two whiskers ranged from approximately 2 to 10 mm (distances converted into arbitrary units that denote spatial location). B, Average position during task performance. The D1 and D2 whiskers move differently (left): the average position of the two whiskers at rest is different (before zero), and the average position of the two whiskers at contact is different (at zero). The D2 whisker, which contacts the piezo-film sensor and is rostral to the D1 whisker, moves more than the D1 whisker. In contrast, the two arc whiskers’ position overlaps at rest and at contact, but even here, the average motion of the whisker used to make contact with the sensor is different from the motion of the adjacent whisker. C, Tracking performance by tracking whisker movement over days. The performance of an animal trained in the go cue task was monitored by monitoring the motion of the B2 whisker over days of training. The go-cue-triggered motion of the B2 whisker is task related by d 9 of training (compared with the imperceptible motion of the same whisker after the cue on d 1). D, The contact-triggered motion is also faster and larger by d 9, compared with its motion on d 1 (on the left).