A cellular mechanism for inverse effectiveness in multisensory integration
- Brown University, United States
- Bard College, United States
- Roger Williams University, United States
Abstract
To build a coherent view of the external world, an organism needs to integrate multiple types of sensory information from different sources, a process known as multisensory integration (MSI). Previously we showed that the temporal dependence of MSI in the optic tectum of Xenopus laevis tadpoles is mediated by the network dynamics of the recruitment of local inhibition by sensory input (Felch et al., 2016). This was one of the first cellular-level mechanisms described for MSI. Here we expand this cellular level view of MSI by focusing on the principle of inverse effectiveness, another central feature of MSI stating that the amount of multisensory enhancement observed inversely depends on the size of unisensory responses. We show that non-linear summation of crossmodal synaptic responses, mediated by NMDA-type glutamate receptor (NMDARs) activation, form the cellular basis for inverse effectiveness, both at the cellular and behavioral levels.
Article and author information
Author details
Arseny S Khakhalin
Funding
National Institutes of Health (NIH F31 NS09379001)
- Torrey LS Truszkowski
National Science Foundation (NSF IOS 1353044)
- Torrey LS Truszkowski
- Oscar A Carrillo
- Julia Bleier
- Carolina Ramirez-Vizcarrondo
- Christopher P Truszkowski
- Carlos D Aizenman
American Physiological Society
- Oscar A Carrillo
- Carolina Ramirez-Vizcarrondo
Bard Summer Research Institute, Bard College
- Molly McQuillan
- Arseny S Khakhalin
Brown University
- Oscar A Carrillo
- Julia Bleier
- Carolina Ramirez-Vizcarrondo
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (1607000219) of Brown University.
Copyright
© 2017, Truszkowski et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A cellular mechanism for inverse effectiveness in multisensory integration
eLife 6:e25392.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.25392
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