Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Institute for Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany; Graduate Training Centre for Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, 72074 Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4, Canada.
Cell Rep. 2020 Jan 14;30(2):442-453.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.12.031.
Non-cortical visual areas in vertebrate brains extract relevant stimulus features, such as motion, object size, and location, to support diverse behavioral tasks. The optic tectum and pretectum, two primary visual areas in zebrafish, are involved in motion processing, and yet their differential neural representation of behaviorally relevant visual features is unclear. Here, we characterize receptive fields (RFs) of motion-sensitive neurons in the diencephalon and midbrain. We show that RFs of many pretectal neurons are large and sample the lower visual field, whereas RFs of tectal neurons are mostly small-size selective and sample the upper nasal visual field more densely. Furthermore, optomotor swimming can reliably be evoked by presenting forward motion in the lower temporal visual field alone, matching the lower visual field bias of the pretectum. Thus, tectum and pretectum extract different visual features from distinct regions of visual space, which is likely a result of their adaptations to hunting and optomotor behavior, respectively.
脊椎动物大脑中的非皮质视觉区域提取相关的刺激特征，如运动、物体大小和位置，以支持各种行为任务。斑马鱼的两个主要视觉区域——顶盖和前顶盖参与运动处理，但它们对行为相关视觉特征的神经表示尚不清楚。在这里，我们描述了间脑和中脑的运动敏感神经元的感受野 (RF)。我们发现，许多顶盖神经元的 RF 较大，采样下视野，而 tectal 神经元的 RF 主要是小尺寸选择性的，并且更密集地采样上鼻视野。此外，仅通过在下颞视觉场呈现向前运动就可以可靠地诱发光流游泳反应，这与前顶盖的下视觉场偏向相匹配。因此，顶盖和前顶盖从视觉空间的不同区域提取不同的视觉特征，这可能是它们分别适应狩猎和光流行为的结果。
