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Common circuit design in fly and mammalian motion vision

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 1067–1076 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Motion-sensitive neurons have long been studied in both the mammalian retina and the insect optic lobe, yet striking similarities have become obvious only recently. Detailed studies at the circuit level revealed that, in both systems, (i) motion information is extracted from primary visual information in parallel ON and OFF pathways; (ii) in each pathway, the process of elementary motion detection involves the correlation of signals with different temporal dynamics; and (iii) primary motion information from both pathways converges at the next synapse, resulting in four groups of ON-OFF neurons, selective for the four cardinal directions. Given that the last common ancestor of insects and mammals lived about 550 million years ago, this general strategy seems to be a robust solution for how to compute the direction of visual motion with neural hardware.

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Figure 1: Models of motion detection.
Figure 2: Motion detection in the mouse retina: direction-selective neurons and direction-specific circuits.
Figure 3: Motion detection in the mouse retina: generation of direction selectivity.
Figure 4: The fly motion vision system.
Figure 5: Fly and mouse motion detection circuits side by side.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Briggman, J. Pujol-Marti, A. Mauss, J. Haag, A. Arenz and A. Leonhardt for comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany

    Alexander Borst

  2. Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany

    Moritz Helmstaedter

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Correspondence to Alexander Borst.

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Borst, A., Helmstaedter, M. Common circuit design in fly and mammalian motion vision. Nat Neurosci 18, 1067–1076 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4050

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