Cricket Wind Detection

A great deal of interest has recently been focused on theories concerning parallel distributed processing in central nervous systems. In particular, many researchers have become very interested in the structure and function of "computational maps" in sensory systems. As defined in a recent review (Knudsen et al, 1987), a "map" is an array of nerve cells, within which there is a systematic variation in the "tuning" of neighboring cells for a particular parameter. For example, the projection from retina to visual cortex is a relatively simpletopographic map; each cortical hypercolumn itself contains a more complex "computational" map of preferred line orientation representing theangle of tilt of a simple line stimulus. The overall goal of the research in my lab is to determine how a relatively complex mapped sensory system extracts and encodes information from external stimuli.The preparation we study is the cercal sensory system of the cricket, Acheta domesticus.