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Authors & Affiliations
Emine Ceren Rutbil, Gurkan Celik, Alp Demirel, Emin Yusuf Aydin, Ismail Uyanik
Abstract
Animals improve their perception of the world by constantly integrating multi-modal sensory information they gather from the environment. The CNS weights and combines this information based on their reliabilities. However, cue reliability depends greatly on its salience, and it varies continuously while the animal moves through different environments. Our goal is to investigate the mechanisms adopted by animals while they regulate their behavior during multisensory behavioral control. Specifically, we study multisensory integration in Eigenmannia virescens, a species of weakly electric fish during their refuge tracking behavior. Eigenmannia tracks the longitudinal movements of a refuge in which it is hiding by combining visual and electrosensory information. Here, we manipulate the salience of visual and electrosensory cues and monitor their impact on the refuge tracking performance of the fish. To manipulate the electrosensory salience, we change the water conductivity by adding a biocompatible salt mix. To change the visual salience, we (1) use a projector system to project light stripes onto the refuge. The moving light stripes give the illusion of refuge movement as a visual cue and (2) use an additional refuge on top of the transparent inner refuge to generate visual cues for the fish. We experimented with N=3 fish under different sensory salience conditions. We used the minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE) model to test the validity of these models on the actual fish data. Our analysis reveals that fish follows the MVUE model in the absence of sensory conflicts.