Introduction -- Comparative Studies of Somatosensory Systems and Active Sensing -- The Whisker Thalamus -- Synaptic Microcircuits in the Barrel Cortex -- Imaging the Cortical Representation of Active Sensing in the Vibrissa System -- The Rodent Vibrissal System as a Model to Study Motor Cortex Function -- The Central Pattern Generator for Rhythmic Whisking -- Functional principles of Whisker-mediated Touch Perception -- Location Coding by the Whisking System -- The Robot Vibrissal System: Understanding Mammalian Sensorimotor Co-ordination through Biomimetrics -- Impact of Monoaminergic Neuromodulators on the Development of Sensorimotor Circuits.

Sensorimotor integration, the dynamic process by which the sensory and motor systems communicate with each other, is crucial to humans’ and animals’ ability to explore and react to their environment. This book summarizes the main aspects of our current understanding of sensorimotor integration in 10 chapters written by leading scientists in this active and ever-growing field. This volume focuses on the whisker system, which is an exquisite model to experimentally approach sensorimotor integration in the mammalian brain. In this book, authors examine the whisker system on many different levels, ranging from the building blocks and neuronal circuits to sensorimotor behavior. Neuronal coding strategies, comparative analysis as well as robotics illustrate the multiple facets of this research and its broad impact on fundamental questions about the neurobiology of the mammalian brain.