Abstract
Environmental signals act as input and are processed across successive stages in the brain to generate a meaningful behavioral output. However, a ubiquitous observation is that descending feedback projections from more central to more peripheral brain areas vastly outnumber ascending feedforward projections. Such projections generally act to modify how sensory neurons respond to afferent signals. Recent studies in the electrosensory system of weakly electric fish have revealed novel functions for feedback pathways in that their transformation of the afferent input generates neural firing rate responses to sensory signals mediating perception and behavior. In this review, we focus on summarizing these novel and recently uncovered functions and put them into context by describing the more “classical” functions of feedback in the electrosensory system. We further highlight the parallels between the electrosensory system and other systems as well as outline interesting future directions.
Highlights
How sensory information is processed by the brain to give rise to behavior remains an important yet poorly understood question in systems neuroscience
We focus on summarizing these novel and recently uncovered functions and put them into context by describing the more “classical” functions of feedback in the electrosensory system
This is despite the fact that multiple studies have characterized how stellate cells respond to relevant electrosensory stimuli in vivo (Bratton and Bastian, 1990), characterized synaptic plasticity at stellate to pyramidal cells (P-cells) synapses both in vitro (Oswald et al, 2002) and in vivo
Summary
Environmental signals act as input and are processed across successive stages in the brain to generate a meaningful behavioral output. A ubiquitous observation is that descending feedback projections from more central to more peripheral brain areas vastly outnumber ascending feedforward projections. Such projections generally act to modify how sensory neurons respond to afferent signals. Recent studies in the electrosensory system of weakly electric fish have revealed novel functions for feedback pathways in that their transformation of the afferent input generates neural firing rate responses to sensory signals mediating perception and behavior. We focus on summarizing these novel and recently uncovered functions and put them into context by describing the more “classical” functions of feedback in the electrosensory system.
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