Nervous System III Flashcards
Stimulus filtering, neural architecture, brain space, cognition (11 cards)
What is stimulus filtering? What is an example?
- Ability of neurons and networks to filter out useless information
- Noctuid moths - A1 cells can’t respond to low frequencies and cannot distinguish tone (not important)
What does it mean for a stimulus filter to change seasonally? What are two examples?
- Filters can change depending on the season
- Midshipman fish - summer males sing at 400 Hz, other seasons females hear at 60-120 Hz.
House sparrows - females resolve frequencies well in the spring (compared to other seasons) because filters get more narrow (breeding)
Under what conditions does stimulus filtering differ between sexes? What is an example?
- When sexes are selected to process different information
- Ormia flies - females larviposit on crickets so selected to follow cricket calls (more sensitive) whereas males do not display this sensitivity
What can neural architecture give us insight into? What is an example? What is an auditory fovea?
- Relative weighting of different sensory modes or different components of different sensory modes (what is important and what is focused on?)
- Barn owl has auditory fovea at 11kHz (frequency given off by mice)
- Extension of inner ear
What is the neural architecture of the star-nosed mole? Where is appendage 11? What is special about it? Why is it set up this way?
- 11 appendages on each side of the nose each with 1000s of Eimer’s organs (sensory processing)
- Appendage closest to the mouth
- Most innervation of the 22 total appendages (25% of touch neurons in these two spots)
- Where moles process food just before eating it
Think about anatomical diagrams that show size of body parts based on how much brain power they use. What are the biggest parts of the star-nosed mole? Mashed shrew? Hedgehog? Human? Naked mole rat?
- Appendages and front legs
- whiskers on face
- Back, face, and vibrissae (whiskers)
- lips/hands/feet
- Face/feet
What is correlated with amount of cognition? What is a species considered to be clever and why? What experiement was done on these creatures to prove this?
- Brain size
- Crows (Hawaiian and New Caledonian) - use sticks/tools to fish out prey
- Use short sticks to make a long stick to get food
How is cognition shown in hyenas? In the lab? What experiment was done to prove that dogs are better at picking up human signals than wolves?
- Coordinated hunts
- Have to pull rope at the same time to get meat
- Humans point/gaze at a bowl and see which animal picks it up. Dogs are better in both scenarios
What is an example of an insect that learns social cues? Elaborate. What was the control used in the experiment?
- Paper wasps and facial recognition - if shocked when chooses wrong face, will learn to recognize facial features to keep from getting shocked (even in other species)
- A solitary species of wasp that didn’t need to recognize faces regularly - they chose randomly each time
What is another species of insect (not paper wasps) that exhibit special learning? How? What experiment was done to prove this? What were the results? What was the result of throwing a black ball into the mix?
- Bumblebees
- Pushing ball to get nectar reward
- Had 3 trainers (already trained bumblebee, ghost (magnet) demonstrator, and no training)
- Bees with social demonstration were more successful on last trial than other 2, and ghost was better than none, and bees used the closest ball (not the one originally used by demonstrator, showing efficiency)
- If the black ball was closer (it was) the bees were more likely to move that one.
What is sensory plasticity? What is an example of an insect that demonstrates this?
- The ability of the sensory system to adapt itself to different environmental conditions
- Hawk moths - sum photon detections (add them together) to get more sensitivity at night, BUT this decreases rapid movement detection, so they find a happy medium (regulate how much integration is used) to be able to see and still detect movement (can still detect a flower at 2Hz)
