A study on distance estimation in flies from my PhD lab is now on @currentbiology.bsky.social !
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our study on optic flow memory in fish is now on Current Biology:
www.cell.com/current-biol...

I'm back in Japan for the Japanese Neuroscience Society meeting last week in Niigata. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meet new colleagues. Sushi was also excellent.

Bit late, but I was at the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting at the beginning of the month. The topic was a bit out of my expertise, but I learned a lot about chemistry, met a lot of great people, and above all thoroughly enjoyed being at another corner of Freistaat Bayern.

Our review is on the cover!
www.nature.com/nrn/volumes/...

I made up my mind to write this when I realized that not a single paper co-cites Meek & Schellart (1978) and Strausfeld (1970), which are classic Golgi studies on fish and fly visual systems with similar ambitions (at least according to Google Scholar).

As I transitioned from studying Drosophila to the larval zebrafish, I have been noticing a lot of interesting parallels between their visual systems (esp. tectum vs. lobula), which I feel are not talked about enough. We explored these analogies in depth in our latest review:
tinyurl.com/3hvkhsyk

As I am posting these, I am in Awaji island, Japan, for the Cold Spring Harbor Asia conference starting today. The last time I was here I was like 5. The landscape is incredible.

Imaging from the inferior olive, I found that IO cells integrate forward and backward optic flow separately (i.e., they lack opponency) with a long time constant. I built simple models that connect the IO physiology to the variable timescales of the behavior.

The key takeaways are: (1) The fish appear to remember only externally generated, but not self-generated optic flow, suggesting that they are tracking involuntary drifts (only), and (2) The fish become more forgetful when the stimulus changes its direction frequently.

Check out my new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Here I run a bunch of psychophysics experiments to better understand how the larval zebrafish🐟 remember the past optic flow in the context of stabilization behaviors.

1/3 How does visual input affect the heading direction (HD) network?

In our latest lab preprint, Ryosuke presents "visual landmarks" to larval zebrafish and shows that the HD network tethers to the visual environment. The experiments are again inspired by the beautiful recent work in Drosophila.