Tracking whisker and head movements in unrestrained behaving rodents

Due to recent advances that enable real-time electrophysiological recordings in brains of awake behaving rodents, effective methods for analyzing the large amount of behavioral data thus generated, at millisecond resolution, are required. We describe a semiautomated, efficient method for accurate tracking of head and mystacial vibrissae (whisker) movements in freely moving rodents using high-speed video. By tracking the entire length of individual whiskers, we show how both location and shape of whiskers are relevant when describing the kinematics of whisker movements and whisker interactions with objects during a whisker-dependent task and exploratory behavior.