Comparative analysis of electrosensory processing

动物依靠它们的感官来收集有关环境的信息。然后，大脑需要提取与行为决策相关的信息。这包括例如将对象与其背景分离，以及确定重要的对象特征，例如大小、距离或移动速度。在这些任务中的成功表现使动物能够觅食、躲避捕食者和交流。如果我们要了解大脑解决这些问题的机制，我们首先需要了解特定有机体需要提取的相关感觉刺激是什么，然后我们可以就神经系统如何完成这一任务提出适当的问题。弱电鱼类已经成为研究大脑如何处理感觉信息的主要模型系统，因为感觉刺激(电场)在实验环境中很容易测量和重现，而且电感觉系统可以进行神经生理学实验。电鱼通过自身产生的电场探测环境，并通过皮肤中的电感受器感知电场的扰动。我的目标是比较使用不同探测策略(离散脉冲与连续采样)的不同类型的电鱼如何处理截然不同的传入感官信息。在这两组人中，用于采集环境信息的神经回路实际上是相同的，但他们必须与截然不同的刺激作斗争。这项研究的结果将阐明感官系统如何进化来处理由与环境相互作用的变化引起的新类型的信息。

Animals rely on their sense organs to collect information on their environment. The brain then needs to extract information that is relevant for behavioural decisions. This involves, for example, the segregation of objects from their background as well as the determination of important object features such as size, distance, or speed of movement. The successful performance in these tasks enables animals to forage, to escape predators, and to communicate. If we are to understand the mechanisms by which the brain solves these problems, we first need to understand what the relevant sensory stimuli are that a given organism needs to extract and then we can ask the appropriate questions about how the nervous system accomplishes this task. Weakly electric fish have become a prime model system in which to study how the brain processes sensory information, because the sensory stimuli (electric fields) are easy to measure and reproduce in an experimental setting and because the electrosensory system is accessible for neurophysiological experimentation. Electric fish probe their environment with self-generated electric fields and sense perturbations of the electric field with electroreceptors in their skin. My goal is to compare how different types of electric fish that use different probing strategies (discrete pulses versus continuous sampling) process the categorically different incoming sensory information. The neural circuits used for sampling information on the environment are virtually identical in the two groups, yet they have to contend with very different stimuli. The results of this investigation will shed light on how sensory systems evolve to process novel types of information caused by a change in interaction with the environment.