Prof. Dr. Volker Dürr

# Active Tactile Exploration At present, the lab is focussing on the mechanisms of active tactile exploration during locomotion. In particular, we study the neural and behavioural mechanisms of antennal tactile sensing in the stick insect Carausius morosus. Stick insects are nocturnal, obligatory walking insects that spend their life climbing about in the canopy. They have a natural aptitude for efficient tactile sampling, because they need to guide their legs in the dark. Carausius morosus actively moves its long antennae during locomotion to sample spatial information for near-range orientation. Due to the simplicity of the antennal joints, the relatively low cycle frequencies and the remarkable biomechanical features, the stick insect antenna provides an ideal experimental system to study adaptive tactile sensing. # Motor Continuity Ultimately, our goal is to unravel the neural basis of sensory affordances in active exploration and the selection of appropriate behavioural strategies during locomotion. Since antennal contact information reliably affords immediate movement reactions of the legs, tactually guided locomotion is a beautiful example for what I call "motor continuity" in behaviour, i.e., the smooth and steady transition that characterises context-dependent behaviour. So far, we have spent considerable effort in the characterisation of anatomical, neurophysiological, kinematical, biomechanical and behavioural aspects of the stick insect tactile sense and tactually guided behaviours. Apart from the "natural" tactile sense, we are strongly interested in the transfer of neurobiological knowledge into bionics engineering. Time is ripe to combine neurophysiological, behavioural and modelling studies in software and hardware. # Modelling & Computational Neuroethology Formal modelling is an important part of our research, as it takes experimental findings to a conceptual level. I believe this is necessary for rigorous and critical evaluation of any scientific framework. So far, we have applied sensitivity analyses, artificial neural network simulations and biomechanical modelling.