1 April 2022, 10:00
How fly neurons compute the direction of visual motion
1 April 20222022EMBL Distinguished Visitor LectureEMBL Rome
Detecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation, predator avoidance and prey capture, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at the level of the photoreceptors: it rather needs to be computed by subsequent neural circuits, involving a comparison of the signals from neighboring photoreceptors over time. The exact nature of this process represents a classic example of neural computation and has been a longstanding question in the field. Detecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation, predator avoidance and prey capture, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at the level of the photoreceptors: it rather needs to be computed by subsequent neural circuits, involving a comparison of the signals from neighboring photoreceptors over time. The exact nature of this process represents a classic example of neural computation and has been a longstanding question in the field. Only recently, much progress has been made in the fruit fly Drosophila by genetically targeting individual neuron types to block, activate or record from them. Our results obtained this way demonstrate that the local direction of motion is computed in two parallel ON and OFF pathways. Within each pathway, a retinotopic array of four...
Speaker: Alexander Borst
Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried
Host: Hiroki Asari
Place: Conf Room/Building 14
EMBL Distinguished Visitor Lecture
EMBL Rome