The assessment of somatosensory function is a cornerstone of research and clinical practice in neurology. Recent initiatives have developed novel protocols for quantitative sensory testing (QST). Application of these methods led to intriguing findings, such as the presence lower pain-thresholds in healthy children compared to healthy adolescents. In this article, we (re-) introduce the basic co...

To cover the receptive field completely but without redundancy, neurons of certain functional groups exhibit tiling of their dendrites via dendritic repulsion. Here we show that two evolutionarily conserved proteins, the Tricornered (Trc) kinase and Furry (Fry), are essential for tiling and branching control of Drosophila sensory neuron dendrites. Dendrites of fry and trc mutants display excess...

According to signal detection theoretical analyses, visual signals occurring at a cued location are detected more accurately, whereas frequently occurring ones are reported more often but are not better distinguished from noise. However, conventional analyses that estimate sensitivity and bias by comparing true- and false-positive rates offer limited insights into the mechanisms responsible for...

In the brain, both neural processing dynamics as well as the perceptual interpretation of a stimulus can depend on sensory history. The underlying principle is a sensory adaptation to the statistics of the input collected over some timespan, allowing the system to tune its detectors, e.g. by better sampling the input space and adjusting the response. Here, we show how a model for adaptation in ...

Introduction: Bidirectional transmission of information is needed to realize a closed-loop human-machine interaction (HMI), where electrophysiological signals are recorded for man-machine control and electrical stimulations used machine-man feedback. As neural interface (NI) connecting man machine, electrodes play an important role in HMI their characteristics critical transmission. Methods: In...

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 en...