Grasping in the pigeon is a stereotyped, morphologically unambiguous visuomotor behavior involving a functional relationship between quantifiable stimuli and response variables (jaw opening amplitude/target size). It may be readily elicited and measured under controlled conditions, is modulated by motivational states and is influenced by experiential factors. The behavior serves a prehensile function but is also a component of the pigeon's ingestive behavior. Grasping in this species approximates the complexity of primate grasping but is mediated by a much simpler effector system (the jaw), involves movements confined to a single plane and produced by a small number of muscles. The jaw movement system is amenable to experiments involving the correlated recording of movement and neural activity in awake behaving animals or Philip Zeigler will examine neural activity in jaw muscles during grasping, develop a procedure for eliciting the behavior in the immobilized pigeon and utilize this preparation for studies of motoneuron activity during jaw movement. This work is important because the pigeon gives us a model system from which we can study motor control and fine movement even at the cellular level.
