A Duration Coding Mechanism Underlying Bat Echo Recognition

Chung-Hsin Wu ； Philip H.-S. Jen

《Adaptive Medicine》 2卷2期 (2010/09) Pp. 71-77

https://doi.org/10.4247/AM.2010.ABA008

並列摘要

Microchiropterans emit ultrasonic signals and analyze the returning echoes to catch prey and avoid obstacles. During this active acoustic behavior, to recognize the echoes of self-emitted pulses is of primary importance for successful prey capture. This article reviews our previous studies of bat midbrain inferior collicular neurons in regarding to their multiple-parametric selectivity in duration, frequency and amplitude during the dynamic variation of pulse parameters throughout a target approaching sequence. These studies show that duration selectivity is a neuronal response property underlying an animal's recognition of sound duration which is an important feature contributing to the distinct spectral and temporal attributes of individual biological sounds. These studies also show that duration-selective collicular neurons have maximal echo frequency and amplitude selectivity when the duration of both pulse and echo matches the neuron's best duration. Based on these findings, we propose that the bat could conceivably utilize the maximal echo frequency and amplitude selectivity of these duration-selective collicular neurons to extract prey feature and size from the expected echoes for successful prey capture or avoidance of obstacles.

並列關鍵字

bat ； duration selectivity ； expected vs. unexpected echoes ； inferior collicular neurons ； pulse-echo pairs