Topic: whole-field motion

Navigating through a vivid environment requires animals to rapidly process a bewildering mass of sensory signals and interpret it in the context of ongoing behavior. Local and global motion cues along with luminance information guide them to orient and interact adaptively within the world. Larval zebrafish react to such signals with behaviors ranging from active light seeking and shadow avoidance to optomotor swimming or hunting that are expressed in kinematically distinct movements. We asked how are the brain-wide networks of neurons organized that process such signals and how do they integra

The ability to encode visual motion information is an essential prerequisite for organisms to navigate their surroundings. For example, animals need to detect whole-field motion in order to stabilize themselves within their environment. While it is known that some features of naturalistic motion such as its directionality are already extracted in the retina, it is still unclear whether all the necessary cues are already available at these early stages. Here we take advantage of the optomotor response (OMR) behavior in the larval zebrafish to study how these animals respond to whole-field motio