Spherical arena reveals optokinetic response tuning to stimulus location, size, and frequency across entire visual field of larval zebrafish
- University of Tuebingen, Germany
- University of Sussex, UK, United Kingdom
- University of Sussex, United Kingdom
Abstract
Many animals have large visual fields, and sensory circuits may sample those regions of visual space most relevant to behaviours such as gaze stabilisation and hunting. Despite this, relatively small displays are often used in vision neuroscience. To sample stimulus locations across most of the visual field, we built a spherical stimulus arena with 14,848 independently controllable LEDs. We measured the optokinetic response gain of immobilised zebrafish larvae to stimuli of different steradian size and visual field locations. We find that the two eyes are less yoked than previously thought and that spatial frequency tuning is similar across visual field positions. However, zebrafish react most strongly to lateral, nearly equatorial stimuli, consistent with previously reported spatial densities of red, green and blue photoreceptors. Upside-down experiments suggest further extra-retinal processing. Our results demonstrate that motion vision circuits in zebrafish are anisotropic, and preferentially monitor areas with putative behavioural relevance.
Data availability
Analysis code, pre-processed data and examples of raw data have been deposited in GIN by G-Node and published under Digital Object Identifier 10.12751/g-node.qergnn
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Gaze stabilisation behaviour is anisotropic across visual field locations in zebrafishGIN (G-Node Infrastructure), doi:10.12751/g-node.qergnn.
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Data from: Zebrafish differentially process colour across visual space to match natural scenesDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.5bc8vd7.
Article and author information
Author details
Aristides B Arrenberg
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC307 (Werner-Reichardt-Centrum))
- Aristides B Arrenberg
Human Frontier Science Program (Young Investigator Grant RGY0079)
- Aristides B Arrenberg
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Kristin Tessmar-Raible, University of Vienna, Austria
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animal experiments were performed in accordance with licenses granted by local government authorities (Regierungspräsidium Tübingen) in accordance with German federal law and Baden-Württemberg state law. Approval of this license followed consultation of both in-house animal welfare officers and an external ethics board appointed by the local government.
Version history
- Received: September 22, 2020
- Accepted: June 7, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 8, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 25, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Dehmelt et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Spherical arena reveals optokinetic response tuning to stimulus location, size, and frequency across entire visual field of larval zebrafish
eLife 10:e63355.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63355
Further reading
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