On population encoding and decoding of auditory information for bat echolocation |
| |
Authors: | Jonas Reijniers H Peremans |
| |
Institution: | 1. Active Perception Laboratory, University of Antwerp, 2000, Antwerp, Belgium
|
| |
Abstract: | In this article, we study the neural encoding of acoustic information for FM-bats (such as Eptesicus fuscus) in simulation. In echolocation research, the frequency–time sound representation as expressed by the spectrogram is often
considered as input. The rationale behind this is that a similar representation is present in the cochlea, i.e. the receptor
potential of the inner hair cells (IHC) along the length of the cochlea, and hence similar acoustic information is relayed
to the brain. In this article, we study to what extent the latter assumption is true. The receptor potential is converted
into neural activity of the synapting auditory nerve cells (ANC), and information might be lost in this conversion process.
Especially for FM-bats, this information transmission is not trivial: in contrast to other mammals, they detect short transient
signals, and consequently neural activity can only be integrated over very limited time intervals. To quantify the amount
of information transmitted we design a neural network-based algorithm to reconstruct the IHC receptor potentials from the
spiking activity of the synapting auditory neurons. Both the receptor potential and the resulting neural activity are simulated
using Meddis’ peripheral model. Comparing the reconstruction to the IHC receptor potential, we quantify the information transmission
of the bat hearing system and investigate how this depends on the intensity of the incoming signal, the distribution of auditory
neurons, and previous masking stimulation (adaptation). In addition, we show how this approach allows to inspect which spectral
features survive neural encoding and hence can be relevant for echolocation. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|