Meeting Abstract
Fruit flies rely heavily on their visual field to stabilize flight. The images projected onto their retinas are only as useful as the amount of information they provide. The spatial information capacity of the eye (H) is a measure of how many unique images can be drawn onto the eye and therefore describes the usefulness of images presented onto it. H depends on endogenous factors of the eye but also on the image source. Dim, low contrast, or fast-moving images all result in lower H. Flies recover this lost H via neural pooling but here we explored how attention shifting can also recover H. We found that flies actively shift attention to predictably slower moving regions as light levels decrease. We also found that the eye is passively designed to respond stronger frontally under low contrast conditions where images would likely be moving slower. Both these attentional strategies would maximize H under sub optimal flight conditions.
