Topic: mechanosensory feedback

Successful actions require correcting for movement errors in real-time. When grasping an object, unexpected touches at the hand evoke rapid adjustments in grip. Touch-guided corrections require proprioceptive and mechanosensory feedback to be integrated with ongoing motor commands and transformed into an updated plan. To determine how touch events guide ongoing movements, we combined kilohertz frame-rate imaging and a deep neural network to track lingual kinematics in 3D as head-fixed mice retrieved water from a moving spout. We detected the offset of tongue-spout contact on the first lick (L1

Animals rely on sensory feedback to achieve flexible coordinated movements, such as walking on rough terrain or grasping an object with appropriate force. Mechanosensory feedback is especially critical, as it operates with remarkable speed and sensitivity. One challenge in understanding these systems is the fact that mechanosensory inputs are transformed by the body structures in which sensory receptors are embedded. This transformation is particularly complex in the case of insect flight, where applied forces and torques are transformed by wing structural mechanics into complex spatiotempora

Sensory feature maps are a key building block in the information-processing infrastructure of the nervous system. However, our understanding of how such maps interface with motor circuits to produce behavior at rapid timescales remains poor. Here, we examine this problem through the lens of flight control in Drosophila melanogaster. Underlying the extraordinary aerial agility of the fruit fly is mechanosensory feedback from the haltere, a reduced hindwing that acts as both a biological gyroscope and an adjustable clock to set the spike-timing of wing-steering motor neurons. Although the halter