Cross-excitation in dorsal root ganglia redistributes coding capacity from stimulus intensity to stimulus location

Cross-excitation among mammalian dorsal root ganglia A-type neurons, modeled with chemically mediated connections, improves stimulus-location accuracy while reducing stimulus-intensity encoding accuracy.

• Why it matters: The mechanism of cross-excitation is known but not well explained, and its potential computational benefit for somatosensory processing is unclear.
• What they did: A model DRG network of sensory A-type neurons was built with chemical-agent interconnections using parameters similar to experimental observations, then tested for coding tradeoffs.
• The result: The exchange is near-neutral in raw information bits, but becomes favorable when intensity perception is compressed logarithmically under the Weber–Fechner law, implying cross-excitation can function as spatial pre-processing.

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