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Start of funding 01.01.2026
Investigation of visual attribute space and neural circuits regulating object avoidance
Prof. Dr. Martha Merrow
Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich
Institut of Medical Psychology
Prof. Dr. Mark Frye
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology
Visual scenes are packed with discrete objects, from stationary items to moving animals. Although natural scenes are cluttered, seeing animals swiftly distinguish a tree from a potential mate. The neural computations enabling swift feature discrimination are not well understood. Vision is a crucial sensory modality in Drosophila melanogaster, a model organism that displays robust avoidance of discrete objects devoid of species-specific pheromone profile. We will leverage the myriad genetic tools available in Drosophila, plus 2-photon functional imaging, to acquire a reference collection of the visual attributes that elicit object avoidance behavior, and the neural circuits encoding these visual attributes. This will clarify whether different object detection neuron types encode different attributes of the same object, or whether they encode overlapping sets of visual attributes, which are then disentangled by context dependent neuromodulatory signalling.