What a plant sounds like: the statistics of vegetation echoes as received by echolocating bats.-猫眼课题宝

DOI：

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000429

发表时间：

2009-07

期刊：

PLoS computational biology

影响因子：

4.3

通讯作者：

中科院分区：

生物学2区

文献类型：

作者：

Yovel Y;Stilz P;Franz MO;Boonman A;Schnitzler HU

来源链接：

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2699101/?report=classic

理解感觉系统的关键一步是分析它接收到的输入。在这项工作中，我们研究了自然复杂回波的统计数据，重点是植被回波。植被回声构成了800多种回声定位蝙蝠感官世界的主要部分，在它们的几项日常任务中发挥着重要作用。我们的统计分析是基于大量的植物回波采集的仿生声纳系统。我们探索物理世界（植物的结构）和其回声特征之间的关系。最后，我们通过分析回声定位和听觉系统的感觉处理对回声的影响来完成这个故事，并根据信息最大化来解释它们。我们研究的所有不同植物物种的回声都具有令人惊讶的鲁棒模式，该模式也由空间反射器布置的简单泊松模型再现。在不同植物种类的回波之间观察到的细微差异可以通过植物的空间特征来解释。蝙蝠发出的信号增强了信息量最大的空间频率范围，其中物种特异性信息很大。听觉系统滤波以类似的方式影响回声，从而进一步增强最具信息量的空间频率范围。这些发现表明蝙蝠的感觉系统是如何进化来处理复杂的自然回声的。超过800种蝙蝠通过回声定位感知周围环境。它们发射超声波脉冲，并分析从周围物体返回的回波中传达的信息。这使蝙蝠能够在太空中定向，获取食物，并在完全黑暗中完美运作。在没有光线的情况下，回声构成了蝙蝠感官世界的主要部分。因此，了解它们的特性有助于阐明回声定位感觉系统。本文的目的是研究天然植物回波的特性。植物回声在蝙蝠的世界里非常丰富，它们用来寻找食物来源和导航。我们表明，回波的一些特征可以从它们被采样的植物的物理特性来解释（例如，叶的大小和密度）。然后，我们分析的感觉系统上的回声的影响，并建议他们提高回声的表示方式，提高信息，是最可靠的蝙蝠。

A critical step on the way to understanding a sensory system is the analysis of the input it receives. In this work we examine the statistics of natural complex echoes, focusing on vegetation echoes. Vegetation echoes constitute a major part of the sensory world of more than 800 species of echolocating bats and play an important role in several of their daily tasks. Our statistical analysis is based on a large collection of plant echoes acquired by a biomimetic sonar system. We explore the relation between the physical world (the structure of the plant) and the characteristics of its echo. Finally, we complete the story by analyzing the effect of the sensory processing of both the echolocation and the auditory systems on the echoes and interpret them in the light of information maximization. The echoes of all different plant species we examined share a surprisingly robust pattern that was also reproduced by a simple Poisson model of the spatial reflector arrangement. The fine differences observed between the echoes of different plant species can be explained by the spatial characteristics of the plants. The bat's emitted signal enhances the most informative spatial frequency range where the species-specific information is large. The auditory system filtering affects the echoes in a similar way, thus enhancing the most informative spatial frequency range even more. These findings suggest how the bat's sensory system could have evolved to deal with complex natural echoes. More than 800 species of bats perceive their surroundings through echolocation. They emit ultrasonic pulses and analyze the information conveyed in the echoes returning from objects in their surroundings. This enables bats to orient in space, to acquire food and to perfectly function in complete darkness. In the absence of light, echoes constitute a major part of the sensory world of bats. Understanding their characteristics can thus help to shed light on the echolocation sensory system. The goal of this work is to study the characteristics of natural plant echoes. Plant echoes are very abundant in the world of the bats and are used by them to find food sources and to navigate. We show that some of the features of the echoes can be explained from the physical properties of the plant they were sampled from (e.g., its leaf size and density). We then analyze the effects of the sensory system on the echoes and suggest that they improve the representation of the echoes in a way that enhances the information that is most reliable for the bats.