Neural activity in a hippocampus-like region of the teleost pallium is associated with active sensing and navigation

Abstract
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Abstract

Most vertebrates use active sensing strategies for perception, cognition and control of motor activity. These strategies include directed body/sensor movements or increases in discrete sensory sampling events. The weakly electric fish, Gymnotus sp., uses its active electric sense during navigation in the dark. Electric organ discharge rate undergoes transient increases during navigation to increase electrosensory sampling. Gymnotus also use stereotyped backward swimming as an important form of active sensing that brings objects towards the electroreceptor dense fovea-like head region. We wirelessly recorded neural activity from the pallium of freely swimming Gymnotus. Spiking activity was sparse and occurred only during swimming. Notably, most units tended to fire during backward swims and their activity was on average coupled to increases in sensory sampling. Our results provide the first characterization of neural activity in a hippocampal (CA3)-like region of a teleost fish brain and connects it to active sensing of spatial environmental features.

Data availability

Data sets and analysis files have been deposited in University of Ottawa's Institutional repository.

The following data sets were generated

1. Fotowat H
2. Lee C
3. Jun JJ
4. Maler L
(2019) Neural activity in a hippocampus-like region of the teleost pallium is associated with active sensing and navigation
University of Ottawa's Institutional repository, 10.20381/RUOR38902.

http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38902

Article and author information

Author details

Haleh Fotowat

Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

For correspondence
halehfotowat@fas.harvard.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0372-4912
Candice Lee

Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
James Jaeyoon Jun

Center for Computational Mathematics, Flatiron Institute, New York, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Len Maler

Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7666-2754

Funding

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (04336)

Len Maler

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (153143)

Len Maler

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All animal procedures were performed in accordance with the regulations of the animal care committee of the University of Ottawa, protocol number CMM-2897.

Copyright

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.