Investigating the role of sensory feedback on behavioral variablity via control-theoretic approaches

Animal behaviors are often robust to dramatic variations in morphophysiology both within and between individuals. However, what strategies the animals use to achieve these sorts of robust yet precise behavioral performances is still not known. A prominent hypothesis suggests that sensory feedback enables precise behavioral responses even in the face of poorly tuned neural controllers. Nevertheless, it is yet unclear how sensitive the behavioral variability is to the salience and versatility of the sensory feedback. Here, we examine two recent datasets on the refuge tracking response of Eigenmannia virescens, a species of weakly electric fishes. These datasets include experiments conducted in a wide variety of sensory conditions. We show that increasing the salience and versatility of the sensory feedback yields more robust and precise behavioral responses. Our findings may inspire the engineers to shift their focus more on improving the salience and versatility of the available sensory feedback.