TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hechavarria, Julio C.
A1  - Macias, Silvio
A1  - Vater, Marianne
A1  - Voss, Cornelia
A1  - Mora, Emanuel C.
A1  - Kossl, Manfred
T1  - Blurry topography for precise target-distance computations in the auditory cortex of echolocating bats
JF  - Nature Communications
N2  - Echolocating bats use the time from biosonar pulse emission to the arrival of echo (defined as echo delay) to calculate the space depth of targets. In the dorsal auditory cortex of several species, neurons that encode increasing echo delays are organized rostrocaudally in a topographic arrangement defined as chronotopy. Precise chronotopy could be important for precise target-distance computations. Here we show that in the cortex of three echolocating bat species (Pteronotus quadridens, Pteronotus parnellii and Carollia perspicillata), chronotopy is not precise but blurry. In all three species, neurons throughout the chronotopic map are driven by short echo delays that indicate the presence of close targets and the robustness of map organization depends on the parameter of the receptive field used to characterize neuronal tuning. The timing of cortical responses (latency and duration) provides a binding code that could be important for assembling acoustic scenes using echo delay information from objects with different space depths.
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3587
SN  - 2041-1723
VL  - 4
IS  - 10
PB  - Nature Publ. Group
CY  - London
ER  -