title: Context-dependent coding and gain control in the auditory system of crickets.
abstract: Sensory systems process stimuli that greatly vary in intensity and complexity. To maintain efficient information transmission, neural systems need to adjust their properties to these different sensory contexts, yielding adaptive or stimulus-dependent codes. Here, we demonstrated adaptive spectrotemporal tuning in a small neural network, i.e. the peripheral auditory system of the cricket. We found that tuning of cricket auditory neurons was sharper for complex multi-band than for simple single-band stimuli. Information theoretical considerations revealed that this sharpening improved information transmission by separating the neural representations of individual stimulus components. A network model inspired by the structure of the cricket auditory system suggested two putative mechanisms underlying this adaptive tuning: a saturating peripheral nonlinearity could change the spectral tuning, whereas broad feed-forward inhibition was able to reproduce the observed adaptive sharpening of temporal tuning. Our study revealed a surprisingly dynamic code usually found in more complex nervous systems and suggested that stimulus-dependent codes could be implemented using common neural computations.
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Physiology Group, Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.|Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Berlin, Germany.|Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4200-8097
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Clemens
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Physiology Group, Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Rau
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Physiology Group, Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: R Matthias
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Hennig
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence 'Hearing4all', Department for Neuroscience, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.|Research Center Neurosensory Science, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: K Jannis
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Hildebrandt
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000222:Adaptation, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055724:Electrophysiological Phenomena / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006135:Gryllidae / Q000502:physiology*; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer
keywords: adaptive coding; auditory coding; cricket; gain control; inhibition