Topic: motion vision

I am working on color vision in Drosophila, identifying behaviors that involve color vision and understanding the neural circuits supporting them (Longden 2016). I have a long-term interest in understanding how neural computations operate reliably under changing circumstances, be they external changes in the sensory context, or internal changes of state such as hunger and locomotion. On internal state-modulation of sensory processing, I have shown how hunger alters visual motion processing in blowflies (Longden et al. 2014), and identified a role for octopamine in modulating motion vision duri

Research efforts in mapping the connectivity of neural circuits has led to a wealth of connectomic data, including the full nervous system of the fruit fly. The dynamical characteristics of the neurons in these circuits, however, are still largely unknown. Recent work has demonstrated that connectome-constrained models with ethological task constraints generate accurate predictions of single-neuron response properties. Specifically, models with connectivity derived from the fruit fly visual system were trained using deep learning to perform a motion vision task. Resulting models accurately pre