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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Discrimination And Behavioral Responses To Communication Signals Compared Across Apteronotids., Danielle Leigh Dillon-Seeger
Discrimination And Behavioral Responses To Communication Signals Compared Across Apteronotids., Danielle Leigh Dillon-Seeger
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
Sensory systems are often uniquely tailored to encode behaviorally relevant signals and comparative studies across species can thus reveal how evolutionary changes shape sensory functions. The structure of communication signals varies widely between ghost knifefish species. Recent findings suggest that the nervous system co-adapted to the various signal structures observed across species to support different sensory behaviors. The aim for this thesis was to compare the sensory behavior of 3 species of ghost knifefish to contrast their behavioral performance with the known differences in neurophysiology. We hypothesize that for the different signal types and species, the ability to discriminate small …
Amazon Nights Ii: Electric Boogaloo-Neural Adaptations For Communication In Three Species Of Weakly Electric Fish, Kathryne M. Allen
Amazon Nights Ii: Electric Boogaloo-Neural Adaptations For Communication In Three Species Of Weakly Electric Fish, Kathryne M. Allen
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
Sensory systems have to extract useful information from environments awash in noise and confounding input. Studying how salient signals are encoded and filtered from these natural backgrounds is a key problem in neuroscience. Communication is a particularly tractable tool for studying this problem, as it is a ubiquitous task that all organisms must accomplish, easily compared across species, and is of significant ethological relevance. In this chapter I describe the current knowledge of what is both known and still unknown about how sensory systems are adapted for the challenges of encoding conspecific signals, particularly in environments complicated by conspecific-generated noise. …
Neural Processing Of Communication Signals: The Extent Of Sender–Receiver Matching Varies Across Species Of Apteronotus, Kathryne M. Allen, Gary Marsat
Neural Processing Of Communication Signals: The Extent Of Sender–Receiver Matching Varies Across Species Of Apteronotus, Kathryne M. Allen, Gary Marsat
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
As communication signal properties change, through genetic drift or selective pressure, the sensory systems that receive these signals must also adapt to maintain sensitivity and adaptability in an array of contexts. Shedding light on this process helps us to understand how sensory codes are tailored to specific tasks. In a species of weakly electric fish, Apteronotus albifrons, we examined the unique neurophysiological properties that support the encoding of electrosensory communication signals that the animal encounters in social exchanges. We compare our findings to the known coding properties of the closely related species Apteronotus leptorhynchus to establish how these animals …