Super Bowl, an open platform for visual stimulation of insects

Abstract

To study how the nervous system processes visual information, experimenters must record neural activity while delivering visual stimuli in a controlled fashion. In animals with a nearly panoramic field of view, such as flies, precise stimulation of the entire visual field is challenging. We describe a projector-based device for stimulation of the insect visual system under a microscope. The device is based on a bowl-shaped screen that provides a wide and nearly distortion-free field of view. It is compact, cheap, easy to assemble, and easy to operate using open source software for stimulus generation. We describe the general principle and test the system in a series of experiments measuring the membrane potentials of visual interneurons in the optic lobe of Drosophila melanogaster.