Detection of object motion by a fly neuron during simulated flight

Kimmerle, Bernd; Egelhaaf, Martin

doi:10.1007/s003590050003

Cited by 18 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…FD1 cells, another type of motion sensitive wide-field neuron, might be less affected by stride-coupled retinal image shifts (Kimmerle and Egelhaaf, 2000a; Liang et al, 2012). FD1 cells are most sensitive to front-to-back motion of an object in the ipsilateral hemisphere and are inhibited by wide-field motion in both, the ipsi- as well as the contralateral hemisphere (Egelhaaf, 1985).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of stride-coupled gaze shifts of walking blowflies on the neuronal representation of visual targets

Kress

Egelhaaf

2014

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

During locomotion animals rely heavily on visual cues gained from the environment to guide their behavior. Examples are basic behaviors like collision avoidance or the approach to a goal. The saccadic gaze strategy of flying flies, which separates translational from rotational phases of locomotion, has been suggested to facilitate the extraction of environmental information, because only image flow evoked by translational self-motion contains relevant distance information about the surrounding world. In contrast to the translational phases of flight during which gaze direction is kept largely constant, walking flies experience continuous rotational image flow that is coupled to their stride-cycle. The consequences of these self-produced image shifts for the extraction of environmental information are still unclear. To assess the impact of stride-coupled image shifts on visual information processing, we performed electrophysiological recordings from the HSE cell, a motion sensitive wide-field neuron in the blowfly visual system. This cell has been concluded to play a key role in mediating optomotor behavior, self-motion estimation and spatial information processing. We used visual stimuli that were based on the visual input experienced by walking blowflies while approaching a black vertical bar. The response of HSE to these stimuli was dominated by periodic membrane potential fluctuations evoked by stride-coupled image shifts. Nevertheless, during the approach the cell’s response contained information about the bar and its background. The response components evoked by the bar were larger than the responses to its background, especially during the last phase of the approach. However, as revealed by targeted modifications of the visual input during walking, the extraction of distance information on the basis of HSE responses is much impaired by stride-coupled retinal image shifts. Possible mechanisms that may cope with these stride-coupled responses are discussed.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of stride-coupled gaze shifts of walking blowflies on the neuronal representation of visual targets

Kress

Egelhaaf

2014

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These behaviorally generated stimuli can subsequently be replayed during neuronal recording and/or used for modeling of neuronal responses (92,93). In the fly, this technique has already been used successfully for optic flow during unrestrained walking (94)(95)(96) and during tethered flight (25,97). Next, it will also be implemented for free flight, since methods are now available both for high-resolution recording of flight trajectories (98)(99)(100)(101) and for presenting panoramic visual stimuli at sufficiently rapid rates (102).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural Patterns of Neural Activity: How Physiological Mechanisms are Orchestrated to Cope with Real Life

Kurtz

Egelhaaf

2003

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Our results corroborate the point that differences in the appearance of natural scenes have little effect on the responses of fly motion sensitive neurons, but they also show that the dynamical properties of the behaviourally generated optic flow strongly influence the neuronal responses. This aspect has been stressed by several recent studies, which analysed the performance of identified neurons in the visual system of the fly by confronting them with image sequences as they are experienced during walking and flight in indoor environments with a 3-D structure Kern et al 2000Kern et al , 2001bKern et al , 2005bKimmerle and Egelhaaf 2000a, b;Lindemann et al 2003bLindemann et al , 2005van Hateren et al 2005;Egelhaaf 1996, 1997). During walking, the response of the HSE-Cell does reflect the animal's turning direction nearly independently of the texture and spatial layout of the environment, but is also affected by translational flow when the animal walks close to objects (Kern et al 2001a, b).…”

Section: Neuronal Coding Of Natural Optic Flow: a Critical Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responses of blowfly motion-sensitive neurons to reconstructed optic flow along outdoor flight paths

et al. 2005

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The retinal image flow a blowfly experiences in its daily life on the wing is determined by both the structure of the environment and the animal's own movements. To understand the design of visual processing mechanisms, there is thus a need to analyse the performance of neurons under natural operating conditions. To this end, we recorded flight paths of flies outdoors and reconstructed what they had seen, by moving a panoramic camera along exactly the same paths. The reconstructed image sequences were later replayed on a fast, panoramic flight simulator to identified, motion sensitive neurons of the so-called horizontal system (HS) in the lobula plate of the blowfly, which are assumed to extract self-motion parameters from optic flow. We show that under real life conditions HS-cells not only encode information about self-rotation, but are also sensitive to translational optic flow and, thus, indirectly signal information about the depth structure of the environment. These properties do not require an elaboration of the known model of these neurons, because the natural optic flow sequences generate-at least qualitatively-the same depth-related response properties when used as input to a computational HS-cell model and to real neurons.

show abstract

Detection of object motion by a fly neuron during simulated flight

Abstract: Object detection on the basis of relative motion was investigated in the¯y at the neuronal level.

Cited by 18 publications

References 36 publications

Impact of stride-coupled gaze shifts of walking blowflies on the neuronal representation of visual targets

Impact of stride-coupled gaze shifts of walking blowflies on the neuronal representation of visual targets

Natural Patterns of Neural Activity: How Physiological Mechanisms are Orchestrated to Cope with Real Life

Responses of blowfly motion-sensitive neurons to reconstructed optic flow along outdoor flight paths

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About