Publication
The rat whisker system has evolved into in an excellent model system for sensory processing from the periphery to cortical stages. However, to elucidate how sensory processing finally relates to percepts, methods to assess psychophysical performance pertaining to precise stimulus kinematics are needed. Here, we present a head-fixed, behaving rat preparation that allowed us to measure detectability of a single whisker deflection as a function of amplitude and peak velocity. We found that velocity thresholds for detection of small amplitude stimuli (>3°) were considerably higher than for detection of large-amplitude stimuli (