... consequences of this plasticity are not well understood. We trained early blind and sighted control opossums to perform a two-alternative forced choice texture discrimination task. Whisker trimming caused an acute deficit in discrimination accuracy for both groups, indicating the use of a primarily whisker...

...Adam R. Hardy; Melina E. Hale ABSTRACT The texture of contacted surfaces influences our perception of the physical environment and modulates behavior. Texture perception and its neural encoding mechanisms have traditionally been studied in the primate hand, yet animals of all types live in richly...