Monday, May 28, 2012

Color and Motion

From humans to insects, color and motion information are thought to be channeled through separate neural pathways for efficient visual processing, but it remains unclear if and how these pathways interact in improving perception of moving colored stimuli. By using sophisticated Drosophila genetics, intracellular electrophysiology, two-photon imaging, and behavioral experiments, Trevor Wardill et al. found that early in the processing stage, color photoreceptors influence the motion pathway and that this input improves the flies' optomotor performance in a flight simulator.

Read the paper Multiple Spectral Inputs Improve Motion Discrimination in the Drosophila Visual System in Science, 18 May 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6083 pp. 925-931 DOI: 10.1126/science.1215317.

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