Organizational and Encoding Features of Single Neurons in the Inferior Colliculus of Bats

Abstract

The past five years have witnessed a remarkable increase in the number of studies concerned with the neural basis of echoloca-tion. These studies have dealt with features of the peripheral auditory system (Bruns 1976a,b; Henson 1978; Pollak et al. 1979; Schnitzler et al. 1976; Suga et al. 1975), the lower central parts of the auditory pathway, such as the cochlear nucleus (Neuweiler and Vater 1977) and superior olivary complex (Jen 1978), as well as with higher regions such as the inferior colliculus (Möller et al. 1978a,b; Schuller, 1979a; Schuller and Pollak 1979) and cortex (reviewed by Suga). But beyond the sheer proliferation, the reports have provided much more sophisticated and detailed insights into the principles that underly both the structural and functional organization of the Chiropteran auditory system than were known before. In the previous section, Dr. Neuweiler reviewed the data from studies of the cochlea and lower brain stem centers of the horseshoe bat whereas in the following section Drs. O’Neill and Suga have summarized their findings from the cortex of the long CF/FM mustache bat. In this chapter, I shall attempt to bridge the intervening gap by reviewing the results obtained from experiments on the inferior colliculus.