Integrated Calendar

Perceivers experience the world around them as organized, with sensory impressions clearly separated into entities. What makes a perceptual object, and what framework relates it to its composing features? A key insight is that under natural conditions, feature and object information is acquired actively, via sensor movements. Motor and sensory variables affect one another reciprocally, forming a closed-loop system. I therefore hypothesize that percepts signifying an object emerge when the motor-sensory loop’s dynamics converge towards a stable attractor. Using snout and whisker tracking data from freely-moving behaving rats, I outline such an attractor for object detection. I demonstrate that whisker-object contact elicits robust signals on a motor-sensory phase-plane, comprised of the derivatives of whisker base-angle and base-curvature. Over consecutive contact epochs, trajectories on the phase-plane converge to a specific area. The area is characterized by a basin of attraction during contact, more so than in free-air whisking. Differences in head-movement behavior are associated with proximity to the attractor, suggesting that the animal makes use of this proposed coding-scheme. Finally, to build upon these insights, I present a novel paradigm for the study of volitional perceptual exploration, in both rewarded and unrewarded contexts. It supports high-resolution study of motor-sensory development starting at birth, throughout task-learning and until mastery. Taken together, these results highlight a novel framework for the study of the perception of features and objects as motor-sensory attractors.