Imaging Neural Populations in Drosophila to Understand Natural Visual Processing
Discover innovative uses of two-photon imaging in visual neuroscience.
During this webinar, guest speaker, Max Turner, Ph.D. (Stanford University), discusses his latest work using two-photon microscopy to investigate the neural circuits that underlie computation and coding in the fly visual system. Gain first-hand insights into how visual neurons represent visual scenes and how multiphoton imaging opens up new possibilities for understanding visual processing.
Presenter's Abstract
Natural vision is dynamic: as an animal moves, its visual input changes dramatically. How can the visual system reliably extract local features from an input dominated by self-generated signals? In Drosophila, diverse local visual features are represented by a group of projection neurons with distinct tuning properties.
Here we describe a connectome-based volumetric imaging strategy to measure visually evoked neural activity across this population. We show that local visual features are jointly represented across the population, and that a shared gain factor improves trial-to-trial coding fidelity. A subset of these neurons, tuned to small objects, is modulated by two independent signals associated with self-movement, a motor-related signal and a visual motion signal associated with rotation of the animal. These two inputs adjust the sensitivity of these feature detectors across the locomotor cycle, selectively reducing their gain during saccades and restoring it during intersaccadic intervals.
This work reveals a strategy for reliable feature detection during locomotion.
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Speaker's
Max Turner, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University
Kevin Mann, Ph.D., Applications Scientist, Bruker
