Spherical arena reveals optokinetic response tuning to stimulus location, size, and frequency across entire visual field of larval zebrafish

Abstract

Many animals have large visual fields, and sensory circuits may sample those regions of visual space most relevant to behaviours such as gaze stabilisation and hunting. Despite this, relatively small displays are often used in vision neuroscience. To sample stimulus locations across most of the visual field, we built a spherical stimulus arena with 14,848 independently controllable LEDs. We measured the optokinetic response gain of immobilised zebrafish larvae to stimuli of different steradian size and visual field locations. We find that the two eyes are less yoked than previously thought and that spatial frequency tuning is similar across visual field positions. However, zebrafish react most strongly to lateral, nearly equatorial stimuli, consistent with previously reported spatial densities of red, green and blue photoreceptors. Upside-down experiments suggest further extra-retinal processing. Our results demonstrate that motion vision circuits in zebrafish are anisotropic, and preferentially monitor areas with putative behavioural relevance.

Optic flow in the natural habitats of zebrafish supports spatial biases in visual self-motion estimation

“…Our results suggest that these animals can most reliably estimate their forward self-motion from regions in the lateral lower visual field, which is consistent with prior behavioral measures. 34 Using a spherical stimulation arena covering more than 90% of the visual surround, 38 we augment previous behavioral results with an extended map of the spatial biases in zebrafish OMR. These results bring together converging lines of evidence that biases in motion estimation reflect a general strategy to optimally measure behaviorally relevant information from natural environments.…”

A high-speed, modular display system for diverse neuroscience applications

“…Since no display method is ideal for all experiments, we developed displays constructed from LED 'panel' modules 13 that enabled numerous experiments, such as visual place learning 14 , landmark orientation 15 , fine-scale mapping of neuronal receptive fields 16 , and multi-sensory integration 17 . Recently the system has been adapted to build a spherical arena for stimulating the entire visual field of larval zebrafish 18 . While this system has clearly been useful, many experiments would benefit from improvements in the complexity, resolution, and speed of visual stimuli, and from more flexible integration into diverse experimental systems.…”

Foxd1 dependent induction of temporal retinal character is required for visual function

“…Not only the HAA, but also other structural anisotropies in the temporal retina may be affected in foxd1 −/− mutants. Recent studies suggest that the OKR is driven mainly by stimuli covering the central visual field (Dehmelt et al, 2021) and predict that the HAA specialisations in the temporal retina are dispensable for OKR. However, OKR and OMR tests in foxd1 −/− mutants reveal defective whole-field motion perception in these larvae.…”