Integration of Salient Multimodal Social Signals and Internal Physiological State

动物同时通过多种感官感知周围环境，这使它们能够在不同的环境中做出适当的行为决定。然而，以前关于感觉知觉和行为表达之间的联系的研究大多只集中在个体感觉系统上。这项由路易斯安那州立大学实施的项目，在生物组织的多个层面上使用了一种综合的方法，以加深我们对大脑如何处理多模式(视觉和听觉)感觉信息的理解，以及它如何将这种感知与生殖环境中的行为输出联系起来。实验将在一种非洲慈鱼身上进行，在这种鱼中，色彩鲜艳的优势雄鱼进行视觉上明显的求偶表演，结合声音来吸引雌性产卵。接受能力强的女性是如何利用这种多通道信息的，这一点尚不清楚。这项工作的结果将促进我们目前对多模式信号和感知的功能和进化的理解，这对所有物种在不断变化的世界中的生存和持续至关重要。该项目还将为EPSCoR管辖范围内的妇女和任职人数不足的本科生和研究生提供研究和培训机会，为公众和其他研究科学家提供科学网络资源，并为本科课程编制课程。该项目的目标是基于显著的多模式信号的接收，识别和描述调节生殖行为决定的神经底物。这项工作利用了之前对一种已建立的非洲胡椒鱼模型--波罗非鱼的感官研究，结合了行为、细胞和分子分析，以促进我们对多模式(视觉和听觉)信号在接收者大脑中的表示方式的理解。此外，它还将研究动物的生殖状态如何影响对这一显著信息的感知。早期的即刻基因表达将被用作神经激活的替代指标，以确定雌性大脑中处理雄性求爱的多模式信号的位置，并测试雌性生殖状态是否影响神经激活模式。补充性实验将确定苍白球下前脑作为社交显著多模式信号和生殖状态的整合中心的作用。这项工作结合了体内电生理学和基因表达分析，以验证腹侧端脑在求爱过程中发挥视觉-听觉处理作用的假设。在相同的大脑区域使用这两种不同的技术分析多模式反应将产生对相同背景信息的转录和生理激活的新测量。这项工作的结果将改变以前概述的多模式通信理论的行为分类方案，并将被用作推动该领域发展的框架，同时为从K-12到大学的学生提供拓展和培训机会。

Animals perceive their surroundings through many senses simultaneously, which allows them to make appropriate behavioral decisions in different contexts. Most previous research on the link between sensory perception and behavior expression, however, has focused solely on individual sensory systems. This project, performed at Louisiana State University, uses an integrative approach at multiple levels of biological organization to further our understanding of how the brain processes multimodal (visual and acoustic) sensory information, and how it links this perception to behavioral outputs in reproductive contexts. Experiments will be performed in an African cichlid fish, in which brightly-colored dominant males perform visually-conspicuous courtship displays combined with sounds to attract females for spawning. How this multimodal information is used by receptive females remains unexplored. Results of this work will advance our current understanding of the function and evolution of multimodal signaling and perception that is crucial for all species survival and persistence in a changing world. This project will also provide research and training opportunities for women and underrepresented undergraduate and graduate students in an EPSCoR jurisdiction, science web-resources for the public and other research scientists, and curriculum development for undergraduate courses. The goal of this project is to identify and characterize the neural substrates mediating reproductive behavioral decisions based on reception of salient multimodal signals. Capitalizing on previous sensory research in an established African cichlid fish model, Astatotilapia burtoni, this work combines behavioral, cellular, and molecular analyses to advance our understanding of how multimodal (visual and acoustic) signals are represented in the brain of a receiver. Further, it will examine how perception of this salient information is influenced by an animal's reproductive state. Immediate early gene expression will be used as a proxy for neural activation to determine where in the female brain multimodal signals from courting males are processed, and to test whether female reproductive state influences neural activation patterns. Complementary experiments will determine the role of the subpallial forebrain as an integration center for socially-salient multimodal signals and reproductive state. This work combines in vivo electrophysiology and gene expression analyses to test the hypothesis that the ventral telencephalon plays a role in visual-acoustic processing during courtship. Analysis of multimodal responses using these two different techniques in the same brain regions will generate novel measures of both transcriptional and physiological activation to the same contextual information. Results of this work will transform previously outlined behavioral classification schemes of multimodal communication theory and will be used as a framework to advance the field, while simultaneously providing outreach and training opportunities for students from K-12 through college.