Frontier in Integrated Neuroscience has accepted our new paper “Population coding and correlated variability in electrosensory pathways” for publication. In this manuscript we review the state or the art knowledge regarding the presence, origins and impact of neural correlations onto the encoding of electrosensory signals in Apteronotoids. We review both correlated firing due to exegeneous signals as well as correlated variability, its potential impact on signal encoding and its plasticity in the electrosensory pathway. Enjoy!

In November I will be attending the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California presenting my research at the poster “Correlation based stimulus encoding in electrosensory processing” on November 7th, 2018 – hope to see you there!

I was attending the annual meeting of the GAIN network in Boston, MA. In two interesting days I had a lot of useful conversations with people from German universities, funding agencies and politicians. Continue reading “MEETING: GAIN 2018” →

Our new paper “Electric pulse characteristics can enable species recognition in African weakly electric fish species” has been published by Scientific Reports.

This study, mainly carried out by Rebecca Nagel and Ralph Tidemann in Potsdam in In this study looks into how the statistics of electro organ discharge (EOD) behavior in Mormyrid fish might carry information that they would use to recognize conspecific versus heterospecific fish.
Continue reading “PAPER in Scientifc Reports” →

Cycle 2 (Electric Fish & STG) at the Neural systems and behavior course at the MBL in Woods Hole has begun… . See some pictures Continue reading “NEWS: NS&B 2018 @ Woods Hole” →

Brainfacts.org has selected on of my pictures as the “Image of the Week”. Check it out here! The image was originally published alongside my paper in J Neurosci in January 2017.

PNAS Journal just published my study “Motion Parallax in electric sensing”, which is a joint project with Jacob Engelmann and Federico Pedraja (Active Sensing Group) at  Bielefeld University (in Germany) and John Lewis (Comparative Physiology Group) at the University of Ottawa (Canada) on the use of sensory flow for sensing in context of distance estimation.

In this study we provide the first direct experimental evidence for the long discussed hypothesis that weakly electric fish use cues from the spatiotemporal dynamic sensory flow to analyze their surroundings. Continue reading “PAPER in PNAS” →

In late 2014 i traveled to Potsdam where Ralf Tidemann and Rebecca Nagel had invited me to the Evolutionary Biology/ Systematic Zoology Group to give a talk and assist in  setting up a video-recording and EOD playback setup that would allow automated tracking and long time monitoring of electric fish in their lab. Continue reading “PAPER in Royal Soc Open Sci” →

Our new paper “Differential receptive field organizations give rise to nearly identical neural correlations across three parallel sensory maps in weakly electric fish” was just published in PLoS Computational Biology. Although the journal published it alongside the picture of a skate (which has no connection to the article or its content), I am more than happy with the outcome of the paper. We even were on top of the PLoS Comp Biol page for a few days (see screenshot posted above!). In this paper we Continue reading “PAPER in PLoS Comp Bio” →

I presented my current work at the DZG annual meeting. The main meeting and a 2 day neuroethology satellite, were well organized and packed with exciting talks. It was great to get back to Bielefeld where i worked on my dissertation from 2010-2014 and meet so many of my old colleagues and friends!