Meeting Abstract

P1.127  Tuesday, Jan. 4  Chemotactile integration in the peripheral nervous system of a predatory sea slug BROWN, J.W.*; CATANHO, M.J.; GILLETTE, R.; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign jwbrown4@uiuc.edu

At any moment in time, an animal is bombarded by countless stimuli. How does the nervous system bring order to such a wealth of information? We pursue this question by investigating chemosensory and mechanosensory integration in the peripheral nervous system of a simple molluscan model, the predatory sea slug Pleurobranchea californica. By stimulating the animal’s primary chemotactile organ at multiple locations while recording peripheral nerve activity, we have determined that the neural activity resulting from simultaneous two-site stimulation is approximately equal to the average, rather than the sum, of the activity observed between each site when one-site stimulation is employed. To account for this discrepancy, we propose a spike occlusion model that is phenomenologically similar to lateral inhibition.