INVESTIGADORES
ALBARRACIN Ana Lia
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Temporal patterns and surfaces properties in texture discrimination coding
Autor/es:
ALBARRACÍN AL; FARFÁN FD; FELICE CJ; TERUYA PY; RUIZ GA
Reunión:
Congreso; XXVIII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2013
Institución organizadora:
Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencia
Resumen:
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 the surfaces 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 detection algorithm. The Inter-event time (IET) analysis allowed us to extract the temporal patterns from the afferent discharge. The best fit between IET analysis and texture measurements were obtained for Sm and a parameters (R2= 0.97) and for the parameter proposed here, DBLP (R2= 0.98). These results show that the temporal patterns are related with the texture discrimination coding and that these coding would mainly describe texture spacing parameters.