Scientists at Yale and the University of Connecticut have taken a major step in understanding how animal brains make decisions, revealing a crucial role for electrical synapses in “filtering” sensory information.
The new research, published in the journal Cell, demonstrates how a specific configuration of electrical synapses enables animals to make context-appropriate choices, even when faced with similar sensory inputs.
Animal brains are constantly bombarded with sensory information—sights, sounds, smells, and more. Making sense of this information, scientists say, requires a sophisticated filtering system that focuses on relevant details and enables an animal to act accordingly. Such a filtering system doesn’t simply block out “noise”—it actively prioritizes information depending on the situation. Focusing on certain sensory information and deploying a context-specific behavior is known as “action selection.”
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