Neuronal representation of visual motion and orientation in the fly medulla

Spalthoff, Christian; Gerdes, Ralf; Kurtz, Rafael

doi:10.3389/fncir.2012.00072

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 60 publications

(100 reference statements)

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“…The orientation bias of contours in natural sceneries, though found to a different extent in different environments and different parts of the visual field, has its correspondence in a similar bias for horizontal or vertical edges in the sensitivity of visual interneurons of a variety of animals, e.g. [61] – [64] . This feature can be regarded as an evolutionary adaptation of orientation sensitivity of visual systems to the predominant orientations of contours in natural environments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Statistics of Natural Image Sequences Generated by Movements with Insect Flight Characteristics

Schwegmann

Lindemann²,

Egelhaaf³

2014

PLoS ONE

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Many flying insects, such as flies, wasps and bees, pursue a saccadic flight and gaze strategy. This behavioral strategy is thought to separate the translational and rotational components of self-motion and, thereby, to reduce the computational efforts to extract information about the environment from the retinal image flow. Because of the distinguishing dynamic features of this active flight and gaze strategy of insects, the present study analyzes systematically the spatiotemporal statistics of image sequences generated during saccades and intersaccadic intervals in cluttered natural environments. We show that, in general, rotational movements with saccade-like dynamics elicit fluctuations and overall changes in brightness, contrast and spatial frequency of up to two orders of magnitude larger than translational movements at velocities that are characteristic of insects. Distinct changes in image parameters during translations are only caused by nearby objects. Image analysis based on larger patches in the visual field reveals smaller fluctuations in brightness and spatial frequency composition compared to small patches. The temporal structure and extent of these changes in image parameters define the temporal constraints imposed on signal processing performed by the insect visual system under behavioral conditions in natural environments.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Statistics of Natural Image Sequences Generated by Movements with Insect Flight Characteristics

Schwegmann

Lindemann²,

Egelhaaf³

2014

PLoS ONE

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“…Oriented edges are the best understood of these features [50][51][52]. Indeed, a recent calcium imaging study on the blowfly, Calliphora vicina, indicates that edge orientation is extracted very early in the visual pathway-in the medulla of the optic lobe [53]. Honeybees and fruitflies learn the positions of oriented bars within a pattern [51,54], and bees fail to distinguish between patterns when oriented features are displaced from their usual positions [51,52].…”

Section: Visual Features That Control the Ant's Saccade-like Turnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Collett

Lent

Graham

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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This review reflects a few of Mike Land's many and varied contributions to visual science. In it, we show for wood ants, as Mike has done for a variety of animals, including readers of this piece, what can be learnt from a detailed analysis of an animal's visually guided eye, head or body movements. In the case of wood ants, close examination of their body movements, as they follow visually guided routes, is starting to reveal how they perceive and respond to their visual world and negotiate a path within it. We describe first some of the mechanisms that underlie the visual control of their paths, emphasizing that vision is not the ant's only sense. In the second part, we discuss how remembered local shape-dependent and global shape-independent features of a visual scene may interact in guiding the ant's path.

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“…Thus, the OSI can take values between 0 (indicating no orientation selectivity) and 1 (indicating strongest possible orientation selectivity). To test for statistical significance, we used a Monte-Carlo-approach to estimate the distribution of chance level OSI values obtained for the data set of a given recording [27]. As a basic principle of this approach, the recorded data traces were randomly assigned to the different stimulus orientations.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitoring of Single-Cell Responses in the Optic Tectum of Adult Zebrafish with Dextran-Coupled Calcium Dyes Delivered via Local Electroporation

2013

Self Cite

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The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has become one of the major animal models for in vivo examination of sensory and neuronal computation. Similar to Xenopus tadpoles neural activity in the optic tectum, the major region controlling visually guided behavior, can be examined in zebrafish larvae by optical imaging. Prerequisites of these approaches are usually the transparency of larvae up to a certain age and the use of two-photon microscopy. This principle of fluorescence excitation was necessary to suppress crosstalk between signals from individual neurons, which is a critical issue when using membrane-permeant dyes. This makes the equipment to study neuronal processing costly and limits the approach to the study of larvae. Thus there is lack of knowledge about the properties of neurons in the optic tectum of adult animals. We established a procedure to circumvent these problems, enabling in vivo calcium imaging in the optic tectum of adult zebrafish. Following local application of dextran-coupled dyes single-neuron activity of adult zebrafish can be monitored with conventional widefield microscopy, because dye labeling remains restricted to tens of neurons or less. Among the neurons characterized with our technique we found neurons that were selective for a certain pattern orientation as well as neurons that responded in a direction-selective way to visual motion. These findings are consistent with previous studies and indicate that the functional integrity of neuronal circuits in the optic tectum of adult zebrafish is preserved with our staining technique. Overall, our protocol for in vivo calcium imaging provides a useful approach to monitor visual responses of individual neurons in the optic tectum of adult zebrafish even when only widefield microscopy is available. This approach will help to obtain valuable insight into the principles of visual computation in adult vertebrates and thus complement previous work on developing visual circuits.

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Neuronal representation of visual motion and orientation in the fly medulla

Cited by 11 publications

References 60 publications

Temporal Statistics of Natural Image Sequences Generated by Movements with Insect Flight Characteristics

Temporal Statistics of Natural Image Sequences Generated by Movements with Insect Flight Characteristics

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Monitoring of Single-Cell Responses in the Optic Tectum of Adult Zebrafish with Dextran-Coupled Calcium Dyes Delivered via Local Electroporation

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