It turns out that experiments in Simmons lab point to the temporal binding hypothesis as an explanation. The hypothesis proposes that people and animals focus on objects versus the background when a set of neurons in the brain attuned to object features all respond in synchrony, as if shouting in unison yes, look at that! When the neurons dont respond together to an object, the hypothesis predicts, an object is relegated to the perceptual background. Because bats have an especially acute need to track prey through crowded scenes, albeit with echolocation rather than vision, they have evolved to become an ideal testbed for the hypothesis. Sometimes the most critical questions about systems in biology that relate to humans are best approached by using an animal species whose lifestyle requires that the system in question be exaggerated in some functional sense so its qualities are more obvious, said Simmons, who plans to discuss the research at the 2014 Cold Spring Harbor Asia Conference the week of September 15 in Suzhou, China.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 17:13:23 +0000
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