Animals must both recognize and localize the sen-sory signals essential for their survival and reproduc-tion. Certain cues contained in a signal define its identi-ty and location. Such cues include, for example, the temporal pattern of song for species recognition in crickets and binaural disparities for sound localization in owls. One can predict potential cues and the methods of using them from consideration of the phys-ical attributes of the signal for the task. The discovery of the real cue that is used by the animal, however, requires study of the animal's response to different potential cues. Once the real cue is identified, the next question is how is it encoded in the language of the nervous ys-tem? One can develop an algorithm for the solution of
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Masami Konishi (1990) studied this question.