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The Journal of Neuroscience, June 18, 2008, 28(25):6319-6332; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1196-08.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
The Processing of Color, Motion, and Stimulus Timing Are Anatomically Segregated in the Bumblebee Brain

Angelique C. Paulk,¹ James Phillips-Portillo,¹ Andrew M. Dacks,¹ Jean-Marc Fellous,² and Wulfila Gronenberg¹

¹Arizona Research Laboratories Division of Neurobiology and ²Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721

Correspondence should be addressed to Angelique C. Paulk, Arizona Research Laboratories Division of Neurobiology, University of Arizona, 1040 East 4th Street, Tucson, AZ 85721. Email: acp1{at}email.arizona.edu

Animals use vision to perform such diverse behaviors as finding food, interacting socially with other animals, choosing a mate, and avoiding predators. These behaviors are complex and the visual system must process color, motion, and pattern cues efficiently so that animals can respond to relevant stimuli. The visual system achieves this by dividing visual information into separate pathways, but to what extent are these parallel streams separated in the brain? To answer this question, we recorded intracellularly in vivo from 105 morphologically identified neurons in the lobula, a major visual processing structure of bumblebees (Bombus impatiens). We found that these cells have anatomically segregated dendritic inputs confined to one or two of six lobula layers. Lobula neurons exhibit physiological characteristics common to their respective input layer. Cells with arborizations in layers 1–4 are generally indifferent to color but sensitive to motion, whereas layer 5–6 neurons often respond to both color and motion cues. Furthermore, the temporal characteristics of these responses differ systematically with dendritic branching pattern. Some layers are more temporally precise, whereas others are less precise but more reliable across trials. Because different layers send projections to different regions of the central brain, we hypothesize that the anatomical layers of the lobula are the structural basis for the segregation of visual information into color, motion, and stimulus timing.

Key words: insect; color; motion; precision; reliability; lobula

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Received March 19, 2008; revised April 30, 2008; accepted May 7, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Angelique C. Paulk, Arizona Research Laboratories Division of Neurobiology, University of Arizona, 1040 East 4th Street, Tucson, AZ 85721. Email: acp1{at}email.arizona.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. C. Paulk, A. M. Dacks, J. Phillips-Portillo, J.-M. Fellous, and W. Gronenberg Visual Processing in the Central Bee Brain J. Neurosci., August 12, 2009; 29(32): 9987 - 9999. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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