Quantitative Life Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2023 Mar 3;19(3):e1010938. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010938. eCollection 2023 Mar.
Understanding how neural populations encode sensory stimuli remains a central problem in neuroscience. Here we performed multi-unit recordings from sensory neural populations in the electrosensory system of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus in response to stimuli located at different positions along the rostro-caudal axis. Our results reveal that the spatial dependence of correlated activity along receptive fields can help mitigate the deleterious effects that these correlations would otherwise have if they were spatially independent. Moreover, using mathematical modeling, we show that experimentally observed heterogeneities in the receptive fields of neurons help optimize information transmission as to object location. Taken together, our results have important implications for understanding how sensory neurons whose receptive fields display antagonistic center-surround organization encode location. Important similarities between the electrosensory system and other sensory systems suggest that our results will be applicable elsewhere.
理解神经元群体如何对感觉刺激进行编码仍然是神经科学的一个核心问题。在这里，我们对弱电鱼 Apteronotus leptorhynchus 的电感觉系统中的感觉神经元群体进行了多单位记录，以响应位于头尾部沿轴不同位置的刺激。我们的结果表明，沿着感受野的相关活动的空间依赖性有助于减轻如果这些相关性在空间上是独立的，否则它们会产生的有害影响。此外，我们使用数学模型表明，神经元感受野中实验观察到的异质性有助于优化关于物体位置的信息传输。总的来说，我们的结果对于理解其感受野呈现拮抗中心-周围组织的感觉神经元如何编码位置具有重要意义。电感觉系统和其他感觉系统之间的重要相似性表明，我们的结果将在其他地方适用。
