Metzen Michael G
Department of Physiology, McGill University Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2019 Aug 20;13:39. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2019.00039. eCollection 2019.
Animal communication plays an essential role in triggering diverse behaviors. It is believed in this regard that signal production by a sender and its perception by a receiver is co-evolving in order to have beneficial effects such as to ensure that conspecifics remain sensitive to these signals. However, in order to give appropriate responses to a communication signal, the receiver has to first detect and interpret it in a meaningful way. The detection of communication signals can be limited under some circumstances, for example when the signal is masked by the background noise in which it occurs (e.g., the cocktail-party problem). Moreover, some signals are very alike despite having different meanings making it hard to discriminate between them. How the central nervous system copes with these tasks and problems is a central question in systems neuroscience. Gymnotiform weakly electric fish pose an interesting system to answer these questions for various reasons: (1) they use a variety of communication signals called "chirps" during different behavioral encounters; (2) the central physiology of the electrosensory system is well known; and (3) most importantly, these fish give reliable behavioral responses to artificial stimuli that resemble natural communication signals, making it possible to uncover the neural mechanisms that lead to the observed behaviors.
动物交流在引发各种行为方面起着至关重要的作用。在这方面，人们认为发送者产生信号以及接收者对信号的感知是共同进化的，以便产生有益的效果，例如确保同种个体对这些信号保持敏感。然而，为了对通信信号做出适当反应，接收者必须首先以有意义的方式检测和解释它。在某些情况下，通信信号的检测可能会受到限制，例如当信号被其出现时的背景噪声掩盖时（例如，鸡尾酒会问题）。此外，一些信号尽管含义不同，但非常相似，因此难以区分它们。中枢神经系统如何应对这些任务和问题是系统神经科学中的一个核心问题。由于各种原因，裸背电鳗科弱电鱼构成了一个回答这些问题的有趣系统：（1）它们在不同的行为遭遇中使用各种称为“啁啾”的通信信号；（2）电感觉系统的中枢生理学是众所周知的；（3）最重要的是，这些鱼对类似于自然通信信号的人工刺激给出可靠的行为反应，从而有可能揭示导致观察到的行为的神经机制。
