This Friday Biology Seminar will be given by Dr Shannon Olsson from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. The seminar will be held on the 11th of October at 13:00 in the Blue Hall in the Ecology Building. The seminar will be followed by free fika! Title Odor Objects in a Complex World Subject Integration of multimodal sensory information allowing insects to find their host plants Abstract Every decision an animal makes is the result of the brain’s complex processing of input from the environment to produce a specific neural output. Yet, the world is a cacophony of information. How, then, has the nervous system evolved to sort through this massive influx of data and reach a particular outcome? Our research explores how complex sensory information can lead to decision making in one of nature’s most efficient “microbrains”: the insect. We take field trips, express receptors, record neurons, generate models, observe behavior, and even build robots, all with the central goal of understanding how different insects have evolved to make odor-based decisions in our complex world. Our work suggests that complex odors can be considered “objects” in much the same way we consider objects as composite images in the visual sense. We find that insects make olfactory decisions through stepwise spatiotemporal feature extraction of complex “odor objects” from the antenna to the brain. Our comparative analyses across species also imply that insects have evolved to define odor objects at different levels of the brain depending on their ecological niche. By harnessing the computing power of an insect’s miniaturized brain, these specialized systems present tractable neural networks from which to define the evolutionary and mechanistic bases for decision making. We look forward to seeing you all there! The Friday Biology Seminar Team
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 11:04:33 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015