Fly photoreceptors encode phase congruency

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• Prof Daniel Coca, University of Sheffield
• Thursday 26 May 2016, 16:00-17:00
• Hodgkin Huxley Seminar Room, Physiology Building, Downing Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sarah Harrison.

More than five decades ago it was postulated that sensory neurons detect and selectively enhance behaviourally relevant features of natural signals. Although we now know that sensory neurons are tuned to encode efficiently natural stimuli, until now it was not clear what statistical features of the stimuli they encode and how.

In this talk I will show that photoreceptors exploit nonlinear dynamics to selectively enhance and encode phase-related features of temporal stimuli, such as local phase congruency, which are invariant to changes in illumination and contrast. To mitigate for the inherent sensitivity to noise of the local phase congruency measure, the nonlinear coding mechanisms of the fly photoreceptors are tuned to suppress random phase signals, which explains why photoreceptor responses to naturalistic stimuli are significantly different from their responses to white noise stimuli.

This talk is part of the Foster Talks series.

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