Event:

Apprehending communication is fundamental to our understanding behavior. In the acoustic modality, natural scenes for communication in humans and animals are often very noisy, decreasing the chances for signal detection and discrimination. I will present solutions to this problem in model systems of insects, where evolutionary adaptations on the level of hearing organs and the CNS have strongly increased the signal-to-noise ratio for signal detection. I will also demonstrate that research on this topic may benefit from a combination of conventional extra- and intracellular recording techniques in the lab with recordings of nervous activity directly in the noisy environment of animals.