Information Processing In The Electrosensory System

某些被称为弱电鱼的鱼产生的运动指令不会激活肌肉，但会从体内的小电器官产生有规律的重复放电，它们皮肤中的电感受器细胞会检测这些电波形。 身体周围产生的电场可用于导航（如通过声音进行回声定位）和动物之间的交流。 大脑中的机制以非常高的精度检测电感觉波形的时间和空间失真。 当两个放电率相似的动物彼此接近时，频率稍高的一个将自己的放电移动得更高，而较低的一个移动得更低，这种反应被称为“干扰回避反应”，类似于两个无线电台保持信号分离以避免一个信号干扰或“干扰”的方式。 一些电鱼大脑中的电感觉通路已经得到了很好的研究，并为更先进和复杂的中枢感觉系统（如视觉或听觉）提供了一个非常简单的模型。 该项目通过复杂的方法将分析带到细胞水平，用于记录和识别单细胞的结构，以研究空间和时间信息的单独输入如何在大脑中的单个神经细胞内被检测和组合。 结果将提供一个复杂的细胞分析，时间和空间信息是如何整合在大脑的感觉通路，因此有助于理解特定行为的大脑信息处理的基本原则。

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.