Visuomotor Transformation in the Fly Gaze Stabilization System
- Creators
- Huston, Stephen J.
- Krapp, Holger G.
Abstract
For sensory signals to control an animal's behavior, they must first be transformed into a format appropriate for use by its motor systems. This fundamental problem is faced by all animals, including humans. Beyond simple reflexes, little is known about how such sensorimotor transformations take place. Here we describe how the outputs of a well-characterized population of fly visual interneurons, lobula plate tangential cells (LPTCs), are used by the animal's gaze-stabilizing neck motor system. The LPTCs respond to visual input arising from both self-rotations and translations of the fly. The neck motor system however is involved in gaze stabilization and thus mainly controls compensatory head rotations. We investigated how the neck motor system is able to selectively extract rotation information from the mixed responses of the LPTCs. We recorded extracellularly from fly neck motor neurons (NMNs) and mapped the directional preferences across their extended visual receptive fields. Our results suggest that—like the tangential cells—NMNs are tuned to panoramic retinal image shifts, or optic flow fields, which occur when the fly rotates about particular body axes. In many cases, tangential cells and motor neurons appear to be tuned to similar axes of rotation, resulting in a correlation between the coordinate systems the two neural populations employ. However, in contrast to the primarily monocular receptive fields of the tangential cells, most NMNs are sensitive to visual motion presented to either eye. This results in the NMNs being more selective for rotation than the LPTCs. Thus, the neck motor system increases its rotation selectivity by a comparatively simple mechanism: the integration of binocular visual motion information.
Additional Information
© 2008 Huston and Krapp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: July 10, 2007; Accepted: June 6, 2008; Published: July 22, 2008. We thank Kit Longden, Simon Laughlin and Daniel Wüstenberg for advice on the manuscript and Steve Ellis and Glenn Harrison for building the meridian and control electronics used in this study. We also thank the three anonymous referees for comments that substantially improved this manuscript. Author contributions: SJH and HGK conceived and designed the experiments. SJH performed the experiments and analyzed the data. SJH and HGK wrote the paper. Funding: This work was supported by the Royal Society and EOARD grant FW8655-05-1–3066. SJH was supported by a Medical Research Council Ph.D. studentship. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Supporting Information: Figure S1. Preferred Rotation Axes of NMNs and LPTCs: The data from Figure 6C are replotted to allow identification of the cell type from which each preferred rotation axis was derived. Solid symbols indicate LPTCs, the color and shape of the symbol represents the type of cell from which the plotted axis was derived. Open symbols indicate NMNs, the color and shape of the symbol represents the nerve from which the NMN recording was made. (2.67 MB EPS) Figure S2. Binocularity Versus Rotation Selectivity: The data from Figure 7 are replotted to allow for an identification of the cell type from which each data point was derived. LPTCs are plotted in solid symbols, the color and shape indicates the VS or HS cell type. NMNs are plotted in open symbols, the symbol color and shape indicating from which nerve the NMN recording was obtained. (2.89 MB EPS)Attached Files
Published - HUSplosb08.pdf
Supplemental Material - HUSplosb08figS1.eps
Supplemental Material - HUSplosb08figS2.eps
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC2475543
- Eprint ID
- 11250
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:HUSplosb08
- Royal Society
- FW8655-05-1–3066
- European Office of Aerospace Research & Development
- Medical Research Council (UK)
- Created
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2008-07-28Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field