부산대학교 도서관

Objective: Weakly electric fish exhibit shelter seeking behavior via hiding inside refuges in their natural habitats. These fish benefit from visual and electrosensory cues while exhibiting this behavior. Our goal is to examine the effects of the sensory salience on the refuge tracking behavior. This will help to understand the relation between sensory salience and behavioral performance. Methods: We used an experimental setup with a 3D-printed refuge, which is moved via complex stimulation trajectories using a linear actuator. We track the refuge and the fish using image processing and estimate its frequency response. We experimented with N=5 Apteronotus albifrons under different sensory conditions considering the sample sizes used in the literature. We repeated the experiments for 54 sensory conditions; illumination: dark, loess, and light, refuge structure: with/out windows, refuge length: 7, 14, 21 cm, conductivity: low, medium, and high. We used N-way ANOVA to investigate the effects of sensory salience on the tracking performance of the fish. Results: Tracking performance of the fish is evaluated based on the gain and phase lag between the stimulus and the fish. Ideally, the gain should 1, corresponding to equal amplitude, and the phase lag should be 0, corresponding to a delay-free tracking. Our results showed that illumination plays a critical role in the tracking performance as the performance degrades (lower gain, increased phase alg) in the dark. The length and structure of the refuge also have significant effects on the tracking response of the fish. Increasing the water conductivity deteriorated the tracking performance by adding additional phase lag to the response of the fish. Conclusion: In this study, we manipulated the salience of the sensory information for the two major sensory organs used by the weakly electric fish during refuge tracking. As a future work, we plan to reveal the effects of sensory salience on the multisensory integration by modeling the sensory perception of weakly electric fish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]