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Main Menu - Block
- Overview
- Anatomy and Histology
- Cell and Tissue Culture
- Cryo-Electron Microscopy
- Electron Microscopy
- Flow Cytometry
- Fly Facility
- Gene Targeting and Transgenics
- Janelia Experimental Technology
- Integrative Imaging
- Media Prep
- Molecular Genomics
- Project Pipeline Support
- Project Technical Resources
- Quantitative Genomics
- Scientific Computing Software
- Scientific Computing Systems
- Viral Tools
- Vivarium
Abstract
Animals detect motion using a variety of visual cues that reflect regularities in the natural world. Experiments in animals across phyla have shown that motion percepts incorporate both pairwise and triplet spatiotemporal correlations that could theoretically benefit motion computation. However, it remains unclear how visual systems assemble these cues to build accurate motion estimates. Here we used systematic behavioral measurements of fruit fly motion perception to show how flies combine local pairwise and triplet correlations to reduce variability in motion estimates across natural scenes. By generating synthetic images with statistics controlled by maximum entropy distributions, we show that the triplet correlations are useful only when images have light-dark asymmetries that mimic natural ones. This suggests that asymmetric ON-OFF processing is tuned to the particular statistics of natural scenes. Since all animals encounter the world's light-dark asymmetries, many visual systems are likely to use asymmetric ON-OFF processing to improve motion estimation.
