Discrimination of behaviorally relevant signals by auditory receptor neurons

In hearing insects, discrimination of auditory signals is vital to mate selection. We tested the capability of single auditory receptor neurons to discriminate calling songs from different individual grasshoppers of the same species. Spike trains elicited from different songs were studied using the metric-space analysis of Victor and Purpura (Networks: Comput. Neural Syst. 8 (1997) 127-164). Our data show that the natural songs can be distinguished perfectly after a mere 100 msec if spike trains are evaluated on time scales of about 10 msec. This time scale is well matched to the temporal structure of the grasshopper songs. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.