Leonard Maler will focus on a specialized caudal portion of the cerebellum of teleost fish whose structure and physiology has been especially well studies to the point that we now have detailed computational analyses of its function. Idoia Quintana-Urzainqui will talk about what sharks can tell us about the evolution of the telencephalon, mainly focusing on the evolutionary expansion of the pallium and how shark embryos can hold key information to interpret the origin of the developmental processes that triggered this phenomenon.

Spike-driven adaptation involves intracellular mechanisms that are initiated by neural firing and lead to the subsequent reduction of spiking rate followed by a recovery back to baseline. We report on long (>0.5 second) recovery times from adaptation in a thalamic-like structure in weakly electric fish. This adaptation process is shown via modeling and experiment to encode in a spatially invariant manner the time intervals between event encounters, e.g. with landmarks as the animal learns the location of food. These cells also come in two varieties, ones that care only about the time since the last encounter, and others that care about the history of encounters. We discuss how the two populations can share in the task of representing sequences of events, supporting path integration and converting from ego-to-allocentric representations. The heterogeneity of the population parameters enables the representation and Bayesian decoding of time sequences of events which may be put to good use in path integration and hilus neuron function in hippocampus. Finally we discuss how all the cells of this gateway to the pallium exhibit mixed selectivity of social features of their environment. The data and computational modeling further reveal that, in contrast to a long-held belief, these gymnotiform fish are endowed with a corollary discharge, albeit only for social signalling.