title: Temporal Code-Driven Stimulation: Definition and Application to Electric Fish Signaling.
abstract: Closed-loop activity-dependent stimulation is a powerful methodology to assess information processing in biological systems. In this context, the development of novel protocols, their implementation in bioinformatics toolboxes and their application to different description levels open up a wide range of possibilities in the study of biological systems. We developed a methodology for studying biological signals representing them as temporal sequences of binary events. A specific sequence of these events (code) is chosen to deliver a predefined stimulation in a closed-loop manner. The response to this code-driven stimulation can be used to characterize the system. This methodology was implemented in a real time toolbox and tested in the context of electric fish signaling. We show that while there are codes that evoke a response that cannot be distinguished from a control recording without stimulation, other codes evoke a characteristic distinct response. We also compare the code-driven response to open-loop stimulation. The discussed experiments validate the proposed methodology and the software toolbox.
authors.affiliation: Grupo de Neurocomputación Biológica, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Escuela Politécnica superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Angel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lareo
authors.affiliation: Department of Data Analysis, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Caroline G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Forlim
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neurodynamics/Neurobiophysics, Department of Physics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, Institute of Physics of São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Reynaldo D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Pinto
authors.affiliation: Grupo de Neurocomputación Biológica, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Escuela Politécnica superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Varona
authors.affiliation: Grupo de Neurocomputación Biológica, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Escuela Politécnica superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Francisco de Borja
authors.initials: FB
authors.lastname: Rodriguez
keywords: computational biology; electric fish; information theory; neuroinformatics; signal processing