Comparative analysis of electrosensory processing

动物依靠感觉器官收集环境信息。然后，大脑需要提取与行为决定相关的信息。例如，这包括将物体从背景中分离出来，以及确定物体的重要特征，如大小、距离或运动速度。在这些任务中的成功表现使动物能够觅食，逃避捕食者和交流。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生物体需要提取的相关感官刺激是什么，然后我们可以提出有关神经系统如何完成这项任务的适当问题。弱电鱼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）很容易在实验环境中测量和重现，因为电感觉系统易于进行神经生理学实验。电鱼通过自身产生的电场探测环境，并通过皮肤上的电感受器感知电场的扰动。我的目标是比较不同类型的电鱼如何使用不同的探测策略（离散脉冲与连续采样）处理分类不同的传入感官信息。在两组中，用于采集环境信息的神经回路实际上是相同的，但它们必须应对非常不同的刺激。这项研究的结果将揭示感官系统如何进化以处理由与环境相互作用变化引起的新型信息。

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.