Abstract

Many nocturnal animals rely on vision as their primary sense, despite light levels that can be more than a million times lower than during the day and high levels of noise. Adaptations in their eyes and retina prepare them to face these challenges. Some animals can use neural processing in their visual systems to boost sensitivity further. By summing visual signals in space and time, they increase the correlated signals while averaging out uncorrelated noise. This improvement of visual sensitivity, however, comes at the cost of spatial and temporal resolution, respectively.

Dr. Stöckl will introduce an invertebrate model system, where this neural summation strategy has been investigated in detail: hawkmoths. She will highlight how this neural strategy is implemented in the hawkmoth visual system, and present ongoing work on the consequences spatial summation has on the behavioural performance of free flying hawkmoths.

Brief Biography

Anna Stöckl has worked as a researcher at Würzburg University, Germany since March 2018, where she investigates visual processing in hawkmoths. She is particularly interested in their spatial vision, and how it is adapted to the different visual tasks hawkmoths have to perform on a daily basis. She previously worked on questions of neural population coding in the mouse retina during a postdoctoral position at Aalto University in Finland, and obtained her PhD in 2016 at Lund University in Sweden, where she investigated the neural strategies that allow hawkmoths to see in dim light.

https://www.annastoeckl.com/about-me/