Electrosensory neural responses to natural electro-communication stimuli are distributed along a continuum.

ABSTRACT: Neural heterogeneities are seen ubiquitously within the brain and greatly complicate classification efforts. Here we tested whether the responses of an anatomically well-characterized sensory neuron population to natural stimuli could be used for functional classification. To do so, we recorded from pyramidal cells within the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus in response to natural electro-communication stimuli as these cells can be anatomically classified into six different types. We then used two independent methodologies to functionally classify responses: one relies of reducing the dimensionality of a feature space while the other directly compares the responses themselves. Both methodologies gave rise to qualitatively similar

SUBMITTER: Sproule MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5383285 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature