Centre for Neural Circuits and Behavior, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3SR, United Kingdom; email:
Annu Rev Biophys. 2019 May 6;48:209-229. doi: 10.1146/annurev-biophys-052118-115655. Epub 2019 Feb 20.
All an animal can do to infer the state of its environment is to observe the sensory-evoked activity of its own neurons. These inferences about the presence, quality, or similarity of objects are probabilistic and inform behavioral decisions that are often made in close to real time. Neural systems employ several strategies to facilitate sensory discrimination: Biophysical mechanisms separate the neuronal response distributions in coding space, compress their variances, and combine information from sequential observations. We review how these strategies are implemented in the olfactory system of the fruit fly. The emerging principles of odor discrimination likely apply to other neural circuits of similar architecture.
动物只能通过观察自身神经元的感官激发活动来推断其所处环境的状态。这些关于物体存在、质量或相似性的推断是概率性的，并为行为决策提供信息，这些决策通常是在接近实时的情况下做出的。神经系统采用了几种策略来促进感官辨别：生物物理机制将编码空间中的神经元响应分布分开，压缩它们的方差，并结合来自连续观察的信息。我们回顾了这些策略在果蝇嗅觉系统中的实现方式。这些用于气味辨别新兴的原则可能适用于其他具有类似结构的神经回路。
