Nature Neuroscience
6, 341 - 342 (2003)
Published online: 24 March 2003; | doi:10.1038/nn1036
Single auditory neurons rapidly discriminate conspecific communication signalsChristian K. Machens1, 2, 3, Hartmut Schütze1, 2, Astrid Franz2, Olga Kolesnikova1, 2, Martin B. Stemmler1, 2, Bernhard Ronacher2
& Andreas V. M. Herz1, 21
Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, 10099 Berlin, Germany
2
Department of Biology, Humboldt University, 10099 Berlin, Germany
3
Present address: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA
Correspondence should be addressed to Andreas V. M. Herz a.herz@biologie.hu-berlin.deAnimals that rely on acoustic communication to find mates, such as grasshoppers, are astonishingly accurate in recognizing song patterns that are specific to their own species1,
2. This raises the question of whether they can also solve a far more complicated task that might provide a basis for mate preference and sexual selection: to distinguish individual songs by detecting slight variations around the common species-specific theme. Using spike-train discriminability to quantify the precision of neural responses from the auditory periphery of a model grasshopper species, we show that information sufficient to distinguish songs is readily available at the single-cell level when the spike trains are analyzed on a millisecond time scale.
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