Orientation is essential for purposive movement in space. In many animals orientation tasks are solved with visual sensory systems. Especially insects which solve these tasks with tiny brains outshine most of artificial sensory technologies. In my opinion the knowledge of the principles in information integration in organisms has a lot to offer for computer sciences. Both systems have to follow the laws of coding and encoding. The combination of these two fields is my major interest in biology.

In my diploma thesis I examined the properties of small target motion detectors in the dragonfly brain. It was possible to characterize subunits of these cells and describe inhibitory mechanisms that are involved in the specifity for small targets. During my PhD project I am trying to analyse the visual information integration in flies. We therefore examine the orientation behaviour of the hoverfly Eristalis with high speed cameras. The 3D reconstruction of those flights allows us to describe the flight and gaze strategy of the hoverfly. The differences in these strategies to the already examined strategies of the blowfly Calliphora (Kern et. al, 2006) might be represented in the information integration of the visual nervous system. To elucidate these differences neurophysiological experiments will be conducted, using the naturalistic optic flow calculated from the 3D reconstruction of the fly's trajectory.

 

Kern, R., van Hateren, J.H., & Egelhaaf, M. (2006). Representation of behaviourally relevant information by blowfly motion-sensitive visual interneurons requires precise compensatory head movements. Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 1251-1260.