Abstract
Many studies have yielded valuable knowledge on the early visual system but it is biased since the studies have focused on terrestrial mammals alone. Here, to better account for visual systems in different environments and animal classes, we studied the structure of early visual processing in the archerfish which harnesses its extreme visual ability to hunt by shooting water jets at prey hanging on vegetation above the water. Thus, the archerfish provides a unique opportunity to study visual processing in a vertebrate which is an expert vision-guided predator with a very different brain structure than mammals. The receptive field structures in the archerfish (both sexes) optic tectum, the main visual processing region in the fish brain, were measured and linear non-linear cascades were used to analyze their properties. The findings indicate that the spatial receptive field structures lie on a continuum between circular and elliptical shapes. In addition, the cells' functional properties display a richness of response characteristics, since many cells could be captured by more than a single linear filter. Finally, the non-linear response functions that link linear filters and neuronal responses were found to be similar to the non-linear functions of models that describe terrestrial mammalian single cell activity. Overall our results help to better understand the early visual processing system across vertebrates.
Highlights
One of the key unresolved questions in neuroscience is how natural scene statistics influence the information flow in the early visual system
To reveal the space-time structure of the receptive fields in the archerfish optic tectum, neurons localized in the superficial layers of the optic tectum were recorded using a single extracellular electrode
The purpose of this study was to explore the spatiotemporal structure of the receptive field of cells in the archerfish optic tectum
Summary
One of the key unresolved questions in neuroscience is how natural scene statistics influence the information flow in the early visual system. A possible approach to better understand the interplay between natural scene statistics and information processing in the visual system, is to investigate vertebrates that have evolved in an environment with a different statistical structure, namely an aquatic environment (Balboa and Grzywacz, 2003). To address these issues, we used the archerfish as an animal model since it is an expert visual predator with a visual system that can process both underwater and land habitats. The archerfish’s visual system provides a unique opportunity to understand the principles that shape the visual system information flow
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