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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ghaith Tarawneh, Dr Vivek Nityananda, Dr Ronny Rosner, Steven Errington, Professor Jenny ReadORCiD, Dr Ignacio Serrano-PedrazaORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2017 The Author(s). The motion energy model is the standard account of motion detection in animals from beetles to humans. Despite this common basis, we show here that a difference in the early stages of visual processing between mammals and insects leads this model to make radically different behavioural predictions. In insects, early filtering is spatially lowpass, which makes the surprising prediction that motion detection can be impaired by "invisible" noise, i.e. noise at a spatial frequency that elicits no response when presented on its own as a signal. We confirm this prediction using the optomotor response of praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola. This does not occur in mammals, where spatially bandpass early filtering means that linear systems techniques, such as deriving channel sensitivity from masking functions, remain approximately valid. Counter-intuitive effects such as masking by invisible noise may occur in neural circuits wherever a nonlinearity is followed by a difference operation.
Author(s): Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Cumming BG, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Scientific Reports
Year: 2017
Volume: 7
Online publication date: 14/06/2017
Acceptance date: 03/05/2017
Date deposited: 05/07/2017
ISSN (electronic): 2045-2322
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03732-7
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-03732-7
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