Neural coding for visual navigation

In the Drosophila central brain, the ellipsoid body contains different populations of so-called Ring Neurons. Different groups of Ring Neurons are necessary for different visually guided behaviours. Recently published data describe the receptive fields for two classes of these cells. What is interesting is that these cells have very large receptive fields and are very small in number, suggesting that each sub-population of cells might be a bottleneck in the processing of visual information for a specific behaviour. It has recently been shown how R1 ring neurons are necessary for place learning in Drosophila. However, the receptive fields of these neurons are yet to be described. By examining the information provided by different populations of hypothetical visual neurons in simulations of experimental arenas, we show that neurons with ring neuron-like receptive fields are sufficient for defining a location visually. In this way we provide a link between the type of information conveyed by ring neurons, in general, and the behaviour they support.

Dewar, A. D., Wystrach, A., Graham, P., & Philippides, A. (2015). Navigation-specific neural coding in the visual system of Drosophila. Biosystems.