Honeybee neurons use millisecond time-differences in stimulus coherence for odor-object segregation
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1
Universität Konstanz, Germany
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2
University of Sussex, United Kingdom
Segregating objects from background, and determining which of many concurrent stimuli belong to the same object, remains one of the most challenging unsolved problems both in neuroscience and in technical applications. While this phenomenon has been investigated in depth in visual and acoustic domains (Gestalt theory, cocktail party effect) it has never been addressed in the olfactory domain. Natural olfactory stimuli fluctuate at fast timescales, which in principle contain information about their constitution. However, it is not known whether and, if so, how animals use this temporal information to segregate concurrent odor-objects from independent odor sources. Thus, the study of odor processing needs a reassessment to take this fast timescale into account. We addressed this issue by combining physiological and behavioral experiments in honeybees. We searched for a neural mechanism of odor-object segregation and asked whether projection neurons in the antennal lobe (the insect homolog of the olfactory bulb) are influenced by short time delays in the onsets of individual components in odor mixtures. Using in vivo calcium imaging we found that the processing of temporally incoherent mixtures with 5 to 600 ms odor-onset delays between the components involved more inhibitory interactions than the processing of coherent mixtures. This inhibition appears to be mediated by a global rather than a glomerulus-specific circuit. Currently we are testing possible functional consequences of these inhibitory interactions, including computational models and behavioral experiments, to investigate whether honeybees could and actually do use millisecond temporal difference in stimulus coherence for odor-object perception.
Acknowledgements
We thank Nadine Treiber and Sophie Kroenlein for help with the behavioural experiments and the entire Galizia group for fruitful discussions.
Keywords:
insect,
object segregation,
Olfaction,
sensory processing
Conference:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011, Freiburg, Germany, 4 Oct - 6 Oct, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
sensory processing (please use "sensory processing" as keyword)
Citation:
Szyszka
P,
Stierle
J,
Biergans
S,
Nowotny
T and
Galizia
CG
(2011). Honeybee neurons use millisecond time-differences in stimulus coherence for odor-object segregation.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2011.53.00140
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Received:
23 Aug 2011;
Published Online:
04 Oct 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Paul Szyszka, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, paul.szyszka@otago.ac.nz