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The Journal of Neuroscience, 2001, 21:RC139:1-5

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Neural Processing of Naturalistic Optic Flow

Roland Kern, Christian Petereit, and Martin Egelhaaf

Lehrstuhl für Neurobiologie, Fakultät für Biologie, Universität Bielefeld, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany

Stimuli traditionally used for analyzing visual information processing are much simpler than what an animal sees in normal life. When characterized with traditional stimuli, neuronal responses were found to depend on various parameters such as contrast, texture, or velocity of motion, and thus were highly ambiguous. In behavioral situations, all of these parameters change simultaneously and differently in different parts of the visual field. Thus it is hardly possible to predict from traditional analyses what information is encoded by neurons in behavioral situations. Therefore, we characterized an identified neuron in the optomotor system of the blowfly with image sequences as they were seen by animals walking in a structured environment. We conclude that during walking, the response of the neuron reflects the animal's turning direction nearly independently of the texture and spatial layout of the environment. Our findings stress the significance of analyzing the performance of neuronal circuits under their natural operating conditions.

Key words: motion vision; optic flow; fly; self-motion; naturalistic stimuli; neuronal representation

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This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. H. van Hateren, L. Ruttiger, H. Sun, and B. B. Lee Processing of Natural Temporal Stimuli by Macaque Retinal Ganglion Cells J. Neurosci., November 15, 2002; 22(22): 9945 - 9960. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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