Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Krahe

Sensory systems provide a wealth of information about the environment and the body to the animal. From this wealth of information, the brain extracts information that is relevant for making behavioural decisions, e.g. in the context of foraging or communication with conspecifics.

The goal of the research in my lab is to understand some of the mechanisms underlying the process of extracting important information about relevant objects or events. The model system we use to study sensory information processing is the electrosensory system of South American weakly electric fish. While to some this may seem like a strange choice of study system, electric fish can actually teach us a lot about principles of information processing in the brain and also about its evolution. To that end, we use a combination of electrophysiological and computational approaches as well as behavioural studies in the field and in the lab.

Behavior and natural stimuli of weakly electric fish

For discussing the results obtained by the electrophysiological studies described above a better knowledge of the statistics of the natural stimuli a weakly electric fish perceives is necessary. We are developing a grid of electrodes that, for the first time, allows us to monitor the behavior of the fish in their natural habitats in the Amazon basin in south america.