Virtual electrosensory landscapes for the behavioural analysis of motion processing

想象一下，当你第一次用不动的指尖触摸粗糙的表面，然后以不同的速度来回移动时，你所感受到的不同感觉。这些感知的变化可以告诉我们皮肤触觉感受器的动态特性，以及参与体感信息处理的大脑网络的动态特性。这种“主动感应”被各种感觉系统所使用。然而，总的来说，我们对感觉结构（如你的指尖或眼睛）的运动如何与神经处理的动态协调以优化感觉信息的获取知之甚少。我的研究重点是弱电刀鱼的主动传感和神经动力学。这些鱼是感官处理的专家。它们通过监测自身产生的电场的微小变化来探测周围的物体，尽管存在高水平的自然干扰或噪音。为了做到这一点，它们用刻板的来回游泳运动来探测环境，从而直接影响皮肤上专门的电感受器编码的电感觉信号。我将通过创建一个生成虚拟电感景观的系统来发现这些运动是如何与感觉处理相互作用的。这种方法的灵活性和精确控制将使我们能够进行详细的行为实验，让鱼告诉我们主动感知是如何工作的。

Imagine the different sensations you perceive as you first touch a rough surface with a motionless fingertip, and then with back-and-forth movements at various speeds. These changes in perception can tell us about the dynamic properties of touch receptors in the skin, as well as those of the brain networks involved in somatosensory information processing. Such "active sensing" is used by a variety of sensory systems. Yet, in general, we know little about how movement of a sensory structure (like your finger tip or your eye) is coordinated with the dynamics of neural processing to optimize the acquisition of sensory information. My research focuses on active sensing and neural dynamics in the weakly electric knifefish. These fish are experts in sensory processing. They detect objects in their surroundings by monitoring minute changes in their self-generated electric field, despite high levels of natural interference, or noise. To do this, they probe their environment with stereotyped back-and-forth swimming movements, thus directly influencing the electrosensory signals encoded by the specialized electroreceptors on their skin. I will discover how such movements interact with sensory processing by creating a system for generating virtual electrosensory landscapes. The flexibility and precise control enabled by this approach will allow us to perform detailed behavioural experiments that let the fish tell us how active sensing works.