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Computational themes of peripheral processing in the auditory pathway of insects

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Abstract

Hearing in insects serves to gain information in the context of mate finding, predator avoidance or host localization. For these goals, the auditory pathways of insects represent the computational substrate for object recognition and localization. Before these higher level computations can be executed in more central parts of the nervous system, the signals need to be preprocessed in the auditory periphery. Here, we review peripheral preprocessing along four computational themes rather than discussing specific physiological mechanisms: (1) control of sensitivity by adaptation, (2) recoding of amplitude modulations of an acoustic signal into a labeled-line code (3) frequency processing and (4) conditioning for binaural processing. Along these lines, we review evidence for canonical computations carried out in the peripheral auditory pathway and show that despite the vast diversity of insect hearing, signal processing is governed by common computational motifs and principles.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Bernhard Ronacher for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was funded by a grant to MH and JB by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB618).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cluster of Excellence “Hearing4all”, Department for Neuroscience, University Oldenburg, 26111, Oldenburg, Germany

    K. Jannis Hildebrandt

  2. Institute for Neurobiology, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Jan Benda

  3. Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10115, Berlin, Germany

    R. Matthias Hennig

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  1. K. Jannis Hildebrandt
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Correspondence to K. Jannis Hildebrandt.

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Hildebrandt, K.J., Benda, J. & Hennig, R.M. Computational themes of peripheral processing in the auditory pathway of insects. J Comp Physiol A 201, 39–50 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0956-5

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