TY  - JOUR
AB  - Gaining information about the spatial layout of natural scenes is a challenging task that flies need to solve, especially when moving at high velocities. A group of motion sensitive cells in the lobula plate of flies is supposed to represent information about self-motion as well as the environment. Relevant environmental features might be the nearness of structures, influencing retinal velocity during translational self-motion, and the brightness contrast. We recorded the responses of the H1 cell, an individually identifiable lobula plate tangential cell, during stimulation with image sequences, simulating translational motion through natural sceneries with a variety of differing depth structures. A correlation was found between the average nearness of environmental structures within large parts of the cell's receptive field and its response across a variety of scenes, but no correlation was found between the brightness contrast of the stimuli and the cell response. As a consequence of motion adaptation resulting from repeated translation through the environment, the time-dependent response modulations induced by the spatial structure of the environment were increased relatively to the background activity of the cell. These results support the hypothesis that some lobula plate tangential cells do not only serve as sensors of self-motion, but also as a part of a neural system that processes information about the spatial layout of natural scenes.
DA  - 2015
DO  - 10.1242/bio.20149449
KW  - Neural activity
KW  - Adaptation
KW  - Contrast
KW  - Fly
KW  - Spatial vision
KW  - Nearness
KW  - Natural images
LA  - eng
IS  - 1
M2  - 13
PY  - 2015
SN  - 2046-6390
SP  - 13-21
T2  - Biology Open
TI  - Influence of environmental information in natural scenes and the effects of motion adaptation on a fly motion-sensitive neuron during simulated flight
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-27132524
Y2  - 2024-11-22T02:37:38
ER  -