The jamming avoidance response in the weakly electric fish Eigenmannia. A behavior controlled by distributed evaluation of electroreceptive afferences.

This study analyzes the algorithm by which the animal's nervous system evaluates spatially distributed temporal patterns of electroreceptive information. The outcome of this evaluation controls the jamming avoidance response, which is a shift in the animal's electric organ discharge frequency away from similar foreign frequencies. The encoding of "behaviorally relevant" stimulus variables by electroreceptors and the central computation of their messages are investigated by combined behavioral and neurophysiological strategies.