Nonlinear Processing of Sensory Interference Drives Social Behavior in Weakly Electric Fish

Sensory systems in animals and robots can receive information from the environment via modulations of sensory signals. Environmental features and conspecifics generate these modulations, and effective computational algorithms in sensory systems can demodulate signals to perceive the features. However, interaction of multiple modulations can themselves generate emergent modulations, which can encode relative information between environmental features. These emergent modulations create sensory interference which can be detrimental or beneficial to sensing. Organisms that probe their environment using autogenous sensory signals are prone to such interference from other nearby individuals in the same social group. Some animals have evolved behaviors that allow them to retain a high level of sensory performance in such a social context. For example, the weakly electric glass knifefish, Eigenmannia virescens, produces a pseudo-sinusoidal oscillating electric signal used for electrolocation and social communication. In my thesis, I explore how the electrosensory system of weakly electric fish use nonlinear processing to respond to interference from conspecifics. ii