Behavioral and single-neuron sensitivity to millisecond variations in temporally patterned communication signals

In many sensory pathways, central neurons serve as temporal filters for timing patterns in communication signals. However, how a population of neurons with diverse temporal filtering properties codes for natural variation in communication signals is unknown. Here weaddressedthis questionintheweaklyelectricfishBrienomyrus brachyistius, whichvaries thetimeintervalsbetweensuccessiveelectric organ discharges to communicate. These fish produce an individually stereotyped signal called a scallop, which consists of a distinctive temporal pattern of ~8–12 electric pulses. We manipulated the temporal structure of natural scallops during behavioral playback and in vivo electrophysiology experiments to probe the temporal sensitivity of scallop encoding and recognition. We found that presenting time-reversed, randomized, or jittered scallops increased behavioral response thresholds, demonstrating that fish’s electric signaling behavior was sensitive to the precise temporal structure of scallops. Next, using in vivo intracellular recordings and discriminant function analysis, we found that the responses of interval-selective midbrain neurons were also sensitive to the precise temporal structure of scallops. Subthreshold changes in membrane potential recorded from single neurons discriminated natural scallops from time-reversed, randomized, and jittered sequences. Pooling the responses of multiple neurons improved the discriminability of natural sequences from temporally manipulated sequences. Finally, we found that single-neuron responses were sensitive to interindividual variation in scallop sequences, raising the question of whether fish may analyze scallop structure to gain information about the sender. Collectively, these results demonstrate that a population of interval-selective neurons can encode behaviorally relevant temporal patterns with millisecond precision.