Electrolocation without an electric image.

Abstract

Weakly electric fish sense their environment in the dark using a self-generated electric field. Perturbations in the field caused by different objects are encoded by an array of sensors on their skin. The information content in these perturbations is not entirely clear. Previous work has focused on the so-called electric image (or field perturbation), which is the difference in the field at the skin surface, with and without the object present. Various features of the electric image have been shown to provide information about an object, including location. However, electric image based algorithms require information about the electric field under two qualitatively distinct conditions, and in many situations, prior information about the unperturbed field is not available. Here, we consider the more general problem of object localization with electric sensing when only instantaneous measures of the electric field are available. We show that this problem is solvable when field measurements for two slightly different object locations are considered (such as those occurring during relative motion). In doing so, we provide a direct link between sensory flow (i.e. the moment-to-moment fluctuations in raw sensory input) and electrosensory-based object localization.