Temporal patterns and surfaces properties in texture discrimination coding

ALBARRACÍN, ANA LIA; FARFÁN, FERNANDO DANIEL; TERUYA, PABLO; RUIZ, GABRIEL; FELICE, CARMELO JOSÉ

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; Reunión Satélite: Bases Neurales de la Conducta: Neuroetología y Neurobiologia de la Memoria en el Cono Sur; 2013

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Studies in tactile discrimination agree that rats are able to learn a rough-smooth discrimination task by actively touching (whisking) objects with their vibrissae. This behavior induces specific patterns of temporal encoding at different levels of the whisker pathway. In the present work we characterized the relation between temporal patterns extracted from one vibrissal nerve and thesurfaces roughness profile. We have used five sandpapers of different grain size as roughness discrimination surfaces and we obtained their roughness profiles by using a Hommel Tester T1000. We quantified all surface texture taking into account certain intrinsic characteristics, such as the simple roughness amplitude parameters, roughness spacing parameters, roughness hybrid parameters and statistical parameters. In addition, we propose here a new texture parameter: the  DBLP(distance between local peaks) by using a threshold detectionalgorithm. The Inter-event time (IET) analysis allowed us toextract the temporal patterns from the afferent discharge.The best fit between IET analysis and texture measurementswere obtained for Sm and 􀀀a parameters (R2=0.97) and for theparameter proposed here, DBLP (R2= 0.98). These results showthat the temporal patterns are related with the texturediscrimination coding and that these coding would mainlydescribe texture spacing parameters.