Meeting Abstract
Dragonflies perform impressive aerobatics to catch prey in flight, using their acute vision to locate and track prey pre and post take-off. Dragonflies track their prey by keeping it above the dorsal fovea of their eye throughout a hunt. The amount of tracking error is known to be an effective predictor of hunt success. Due to the limited neural information bandwidth in the ventral nerve cord of the dragonfly, efficient encoding of relevant spatial and directional information of the prey is critical. A set of 16 visually responsive neurons called Target Selective Descending Neurons (TSDNs) have been shown to encode the direction of prey motion. However, the full extent of the receptive fields (edge to edge with high resolution) as well as the prey position encoding mechanisms in these neurons are not known. We introduce the full extent of TSDN receptive fields and their implications on the nature of coding of spatial and directional states of visual targets in the TSDNs. The complete receptive field data allow rigorous testing of different coding hypotheses and the construction of a model that incorporates position, direction and the classes of prey trajectories.
