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Motor outputs are generated in the reticular pontine nucleus, which projects to the ventral spinal horn through the reticulospinal tract. Mapping studies have demonstrated that the acoustic startle reflex is mediated by a specific neural pathway with acoustic information entering the CNS through auditory nerve input to the cochlear nucleus, which projects to the reticular pontine nucleus via the lateral lemnisus. In rodents, the startle response is typically evoked using either acoustic or tactile stimuli and is characterized by contractions of the major muscles of the body, generally leading to extension of the forepaws and hind paws followed by muscle flexion into a hunched position.
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The startle reflex is a stereotyped motor response to a sudden, intense stimulus that has been assessed experimentally in a variety of species, including rats, mice, cats, monkeys, and humans. A number of behavioral tasks have been designed to assess sensorimotor performance in rodents, and this chapter focuses on five general procedures-acoustic startle, sensory gating, open field exploration, rotarod, and beam walking. Moreover, sensorimotor effects of manipulations can often be used in animal models as surrogates for effects that are more difficult to measure, and relatively simple variations of sensorimotor measures can be used as indices of performance in other behavioral domains, including cognition and emotion. For example, if a lesion or genetic manipulation impairs performance on a spatial memory test, such as the radial arm maze, this impairment cannot be interpreted as evidence of cognitive dysfunction unless it is first established that it is not the result of sensorimotor deficits. Thus, the results of behavioral experiments designed to assess other neurobiological processes often cannot be properly interpreted without considering concomitant effects on sensorimotor function. Measurement of sensorimotor performance is of obvious importance in investigations of sensory or motor processes however, the effects of experimental manipulations on sensorimotor performance have broader implications for behavioral neuroscience because behavioral experiments typically measure motor responses to sensory information. Assessment of sensorimotor competence is an important part of the evaluation of animal behavior.