Abstract

Animals face continuous trade-offs when sensing their environment, processing sensory information, and transforming sensory inputs into behavioural outputs. These trade-offs often vary depending on the behavioural context, with some behaviours requiring high speed and low information content – such as gaze stabilisation – while others can take place over longer timescales but integrate more sensory channels – e.g. object identification and quality assessment. Many marine and intertidal species have access to intensity, colour and polarization-based visual information, but not all are used for every task. In this seminar, I will explore how crabs and cuttlefish deploy their visual systems to optimise visual processing and cope with visual problems such as dynamic illumination.