Upper airway muscles subserve many essential for survival orofacial behaviors, including
their important role as accessory respiratory muscles. In the face of certain predisposition of …

Highlights•Three-dimensional analysis reveals key features of whisking mechanics and
geometry.•Head-centered, resting-whisker, and whisker-centered reference frames are …

The delineation of sensorimotor circuits that guide exploration begins with an understanding
of the pattern of motor outputs [1]. These motor patterns provide a clue to the form of the …

Sniffing and whisking typify the exploratory behavior of rodents. These actions involve
separate oscillators in the medulla, located respectively in the pre-Bötzinger complex …

The breathing rhythm serves as a reference that paces orofacial motor actions and
orchestrates active sensing. Past work has reported that pacing occurs solely at a fixed …

Rats' whisking motion and objects' palpation produce tactile signals sensed by
mechanoreceptors at the vibrissal follicles. Rats adjust their whisking patterns to target …

The facial dermato-muscular system consists of highly specialized muscles tightly adhering
to the overlaying skin and thus form a complex morphological conglomerate. This is the …

Muscle is a complex tissue that has been studied on numerous hierarchical levels: from
gross descriptions of muscle organization to cellular analyses of fiber profiles. In the middle …

The exploratory behavior of rodents is characterized by stereotypical movements of the
vibrissae, nose, and head, which are phase locked with rapid respiration, that is, sniffing …

The pre-Bötzinger complex (preBötC), a key primary generator of the inspiratory breathing
rhythm, contains neurons that project directly to facial nucleus (7n) motoneurons to …