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Spatial processing of visual information in the movement-detecting pathway of the fly

Characteristics and functional significance

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Summary

  1. 1.

    Spatial processing of visual signals in the fly's movement-detecting pathway was studied by recording the responses of directionally-selective movement-detecting (DSMD) neurons in the lobula plate. The summarized results pertain to a type of neuron which preferentially responds to horizontal movement directed toward the animal's midline. Three kinds of visual stimuli were used: moving gratings, reversing-contrast gratings and reversing-contrast bars.

  2. 2.

    Contrast-sensitivity functions were measured for reversing-contrast gratings. With horizontally-oriented gratings, sensitivity is maximum at the lowspatial-frequency end and falls off toward high frequencies. With vertically-oriented gratings, sensitivity is maximum at an intermediate spatial frequency (Fig. 7). These results are consistent with a neural organization in which the DSMD neuron receives its input through an array of small-field (“ sampling”) units, each unit having a receptive field comprising an excitatory centre and horizontally-extending inhibitory flanks (Fig. 17).

  3. 3.

    Threshold contrast functions were measured for reversing-contrast bars (Figs. 11 and 12). The results for horizontally-oriented bars differ from those for vertically-oriented bars in a way that is consistent with the hypothesized neural organization.

  4. 4.

    Response to horizontally-moving, verticallyoriented gratings of various spatial frequencies were measured (Figs. 13 and 14) and the results used to infer the azimuthal angle\(\widetilde{\Delta \phi }\) between the visual axes of sampling units participating in directionally-selective movement detection (Fig. 18). At a mean luminance of 10 cd/m2, the inferred value of\(\widetilde{\Delta \phi }\) is approximately equal to the angle between the visual axes of adjacent ommatidia of a horizontal row, in the frontal eye region (Figs. 14, 18).

  5. 5.

    When the level of ambient light is decreased, the response characteristics of the DSMD neuron change in a way which suggests that, within the eye, the neural representation of the visual scene becomes coarser than the ommatidial mosaic. When mean luminance is lowered by 3 log units (from 10 cd/m2 to 0.01 cd/m2) the altered response characteristics suggest neuronal modifications such that the excitatory centres of the sampling units' receptive fields become 50% wider (Figs. 7 and 17), the inhibitory flanks become weaker and more diffuse, and\(\widetilde{\Delta \phi }\) increases by 30% (Figs. 14 and 18). Neuronal mechanisms that might mediate such changes are proposed and discussed.

  6. 6.

    The experimentally-measured characteristics of the DSMD neuron are compared with theoretically-predicted characteristics of an ideal movement detector, designed for optimum performance. This comparison suggests that the fly's movement-detecting pathway prefilters visual signals in such a way as to extract the most reliable movement cues, and that it analyzes the filtered information in a way that achieves maximum directional selectivity. The characteristics of the movement-detecting pathway vary with luminance in a way that ensures the best attainable performance at each level of ambient light (Fig. 21).

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Abbreviations

DSMD :

directionally-selective movement detector

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Author notes

  1. D. R. Dvorak

    Present address: Medical School, Department of Physiology, University of Michigan, 48109, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, Australian National University, 2600, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    M. V. Srinivasan & D. R. Dvorak

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics, Australian National University, 2600, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    M. V. Srinivasan

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  1. M. V. Srinivasan
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  2. D. R. Dvorak
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Srinivasan, M.V., Dvorak, D.R. Spatial processing of visual information in the movement-detecting pathway of the fly. J. Comp. Physiol. 140, 1–23 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00613743

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