Information Processing In The Electrosensory System

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Certain fish known as weakly electric fish produce motor commands that do not activate muscles, but produce a regularly repeated discharge from small electric organs in the body, and they have electroreceptor cells in the skin that detect these electric waveforms. The electric field produced around the body can be used for navigation (as with echolocation by sound) and for communication between animals. Mechanisms in the brain detect the timing and spatial distortions of the electrosensory waveform with a very high precision. When two animals with similar discharge rates approach each other, the one with the slightly higher frequency shifts its own discharge higher, and the lower one shifts still lower, and this response is known as the 'jamming avoidance response' by analogy to the way two radio stations keep their signals separate to avoid having one signal interfere, or 'jam', with the other. The electrosensory pathways in the brain of some electric fish have been well studied, and provide an excellent simpler model for more advanced and complex central sensory systems such as vision or audition. This project carries the analysis to the cellular level with sophisticated methodology for recording and identifying the structure of single cells, to examine how the separate inputs of spatial and temporal information are detected and combined within single nerve cells in the brain. Results will provide a sophisticated cellular analysis of how timing and spatial information are integrated in a sensory pathway in the brain, and so contribute to understanding basic principles of information processing in the brain for particular behaviors.