Introduction to Part IV

Sensory systems form the interface between an organism and its environment. Their task is not only to transduce a variety of physical signals like light, sound, chemical substances or mechanical stress into neuronal spikes, but to extract information relevant for the organism from those signals, and to encode this information in an appropriate way for further processing. Sensory systems have to be adaptive, because they have to match the changing requirements of the organism as well as the changing structure of the environment. As a consequence, sensing and early sensory processing play a non-trivial role in neural information processing, and contribute — due to the complexity of their function — to the phenomenon which in layman’s terms is called “intelligence”. The articles which are collected in this chapter should illustrate this point and should draw the readers attention to the demands of sensory processing and to the complexity of neural sensory systems.