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Résumé |
An animal eye is only as efficient as the organism’s behavioral constraints demand
it to be. While efficient coding has been a successful organizational principle in
vision, to make a more general theory, behavioral, mechanistic, and even
evolutionary constraints need to be added to this framework. In our work, we use a
mix of known computational hurdles and detailed behavioral measurements to add
constraints to the notion of optimality in vision. Developing a general theory of
the evolution of computation is a current research direction in our group. We use
our recent experimental results in butterfly color vision as well as simple models
of insect vision to test hypotheses about whether neural computations contain
shadows of the evolutionary history of an organism. In the visual system of
Heliconius butterflies, we identified a striking physiological difference between
yellow- and white-striped males that could provide an evolutionarily labile
circuit motif in the eye to rapidly switch behavioral preference. Using single-
cell electrophysiology recordings, we found that some ultraviolet (UV)-sensitive
photoreceptors receive inhibition from long-wavelength photoreceptors in the male
eye. Surprisingly, the proportion of inhibited UV photoreceptors was strongly
correlated with male wing color, suggesting a difference in the early stages of
visual processing that could plausibly influence courtship decisions. |
