Insect vision

Summary form only given. In my talk, I will discuss the research my colleagues and I are carrying out at the Insect Vision Research Laboratory at the University of Adelaide. This research asks how the brain makes sense of the world viewed by the eye. Insects are ideal for tackling this problem at theoretical, physiological and behavioural levels. With a visual system that accounts for as much as 30% of the lifted mass, some flying insects invest more in vision than any other animal. What happens to the abundance of information collected by such large eyes? How has the brain evolved to optimally extract the features from scenes that are most relevant to the behaviour adopted? We have employed multidisciplinary approaches in addressing these challenging questions. Neural pathways are used for detection of moving patterns and objects. Computer models for circuits that can ´filter´ out behaviourally relevant components of images that change in space and time are compared with physiological recordings from neurons in the insect brain. Both theory and physiological data are related to the behaviour of different insects and their visual ecology. The principal aim is to deduce the algorithms used by insect neurons to generate specific responses to visual patterns. The insect optic lobe is a superb model system for studying mechanisms by which networks of neurons analyse visual stimuli. We adopt a wide variety of techniques drawn from biology, computer science and engineering to augment our basic neurophysiological approach to studying this system.