title: A role of synchronicity of neural activity based on dynamic plasticity of synapses in encoding spatiotemporal features of electrosensory stimuli.
abstract: It is quite important for investigation of sensory mechanism to understand how dynamical property of neurons is used for encoding the feature of spatiotemporally varying stimuli. To consider concretely the problem, we focus our study on electrosensory system of a weakly electric fish. Weakly electric fish generate electric field around their body using electric organ discharge (EOD) and accurately detect the location of an object through the modulation of electric field induced by the object. We made a neural network model of electrosensory lateral-line lobe (ELL). Here we show that the features of EOD modulation depending specifically distance and size of an object are encoded into the timing of burst firing of ELL neurons. These features can be represented by the spatial area of synchronous burst firing and the interburst interval in the ELL network. We show that short-term changes of excitatory and inhibitory synapses, induced by efferent signals, regulate the ELL activity so as to effectively encode the features of EOD modulation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Network Science, Graduate School of Information Science, University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan. k-z@nerve.pc.uec.ac.jp
authors.forename: Kazuhisa
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Fujita
authors.forename: Yoshiki
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kashimori
authors.forename: Meihong
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kambara
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004557:Electric Organ / Q000502:physiology*; D023702:Gymnotiformes / Q000502:physiology*; D008959:Models, Neurological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D013569:Synapses / Q000502:physiology*