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The Journal of Neuroscience, March 29, 2006, 26(13):3454-3464; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5259-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Neural Representation of Object Approach in a Decision-Making Motor Circuit

Thomas Preuss,¹ Princess E. Osei-Bonsu,¹ Shennan A. Weiss,¹ C. Wang,² and Donald S. Faber¹

Departments of ¹Neuroscience and ²Epidemiology and Population Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Thomas Preuss, Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461. Email: tpreuss{at}aecom.yu.edu

Although behavior is ultimately guided by decision-making neurons and their associated networks, the mechanisms underlying neural decision-making in a behaviorally relevant context remain mostly elusive. To address this question, we analyzed goldfish escapes in response to distinct visual looming stimuli with high-speed video and compared them with electrophysiological responses of the Mauthner cell (M-cell), the threshold detector that initiates such behaviors. These looming stimuli evoke powerful and fast body-bend (C-start) escapes with response probabilities between 0.7 and 0.91 and mean latencies ranging from 142 to 716 ms. Chronic recordings showed that these C-starts are correlated with M-cell activity. Analysis of response latency as a function of the different optical parameters characterizing the stimuli suggests response threshold is closely correlated to a dynamically scaled function of angular retinal image size, (t), specifically (t) = (t – x e^{–(t – )}, where the exponential term progressively reduces the weight of (t). Intracellular recordings show that looming stimuli typically evoked bursts of graded EPSPs with peak amplitudes up to 9 mV in the M-cell. The proposed scaling function (t) predicts the slope of the depolarizing envelope of these EPSPs and the timing of the largest peak. An analysis of the firing rate of presynaptic inhibitory interneurons suggests the timing of the EPSP peak is shaped by an interaction of excitatory and inhibitory inputs to the M-cell and corresponds to the temporal window in which the probabilistic decision of whether or not to escape is reached.

Key words: neuroethology; sensorimotor integration; visual looming; startle response; Mauthner cell; single-neuron computation

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Received Dec. 9, 2005; revised Feb. 3, 2006; accepted Feb. 5, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Thomas Preuss, Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461. Email: tpreuss{at}aecom.yu.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				T. Schlegel and S. Schuster Small Circuits for Large Tasks: High-Speed Decision-Making in Archerfish Science, January 4, 2008; 319(5859): 104 - 106. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				V. Medan, D. Oliva, and D. Tomsic Characterization of Lobula Giant Neurons Responsive to Visual Stimuli That Elicit Escape Behaviors in the Crab Chasmagnathus J Neurophysiol, October 1, 2007; 98(4): 2414 - 2428. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				H. Fotowat and F. Gabbiani Relationship between the Phases of Sensory and Motor Activity during a Looming-Evoked Multistage Escape Behavior J. Neurosci., September 12, 2007; 27(37): 10047 - 10059. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. A. Weiss, S. J. Zottoli, S. C. Do, D. S. Faber, and T. Preuss Correlation of C-start behaviors with neural activity recorded from the hindbrain in free-swimming goldfish (Carassius auratus) J. Exp. Biol., December 1, 2006; 209(23): 4788 - 4801. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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