title: Temporal encoding precision of bat auditory neurons tuned to target distance deteriorates on the way to the cortex.
abstract: During echolocation, bats estimate distance to avoid obstacles and capture moving prey. The primary distance cue is the delay between the bat's emitted echolocation pulse and the return of an echo. In the bat's auditory system, echo delay-tuned neurons that only respond to pulse-echo pairs having a specific echo delay serve target distance calculation. Accurate prey localization should benefit from the spike precision in such neurons. Here we show that delay-tuned neurons in the inferior colliculus of the mustached bat respond with higher temporal precision, shorter latency and shorter response duration than those of the auditory cortex. Based on these characteristics, we suggest that collicular neurons are best suited for a fast and accurate response that could lead to fast behavioral reactions while cortical neurons, with coarser temporal precision and longer latencies and response durations could be more appropriate for integrating acoustic information over time. The latter could be important for the formation of biosonar images.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Zellbiologie und Neurowissenschaft, J.W. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. silvio_macias@yahoo.com.
authors.forename: Silvio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Macías
authors.affiliation: Institut für Zellbiologie und Neurowissenschaft, J.W. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
authors.forename: Julio C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Hechavarría
authors.affiliation: Institut für Zellbiologie und Neurowissenschaft, J.W. Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
authors.forename: Manfred
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kössl
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D001306:Auditory Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002685:Chiroptera / Q000502:physiology*; D004455:Echolocation / Q000502:physiology*; D007245:Inferior Colliculi / Q000166:cytology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric
keywords: Auditory cortex; Bats; Delay tuning; Inferior colliculus; Spiking precision