Anna Stöckl

Vision is one of our major access ports to the physical world. Because of its central importance to human and animal behaviour, understanding how neural processing gives rise to the visual percept is one of the key questions in neuroscience research. To extract meaning from the text in this application, you are currently using a central feature of your visual system: pattern vision. With essential functions in object recognition, navigation and communication, it constitutes a fundamental pillar of animal vision. In its most generalised form it provides a size-, position- and orientation-invariant representation of a pattern. Given that our brain dedicates several hundred million neurons to this task, it is all the more astonishing that insects, with brains smaller than a grain of rice, recognise and memorise visual patterns as well. Some insect pollinators even possess the ability to generalise pattern features. They thus provide a model to study the neural implementation of invariant pattern recognition with limited computational resources. While insect pattern discrimination behaviour has been studied extensively, very little is known about its neuronal implementation. I plan to close this gap, using a hawkmoth as a tractable model to dissect the invariant pattern vision circuits of insects from photons to behaviour. 

The hummingbird hawkmoth (Macroglossum stellatarum) combines a physiologically accessible nervous system and a biologically relevant behavioural paradigm with which to study invariant pattern recognition. I plan to dissect the neural mechanisms underlying this behaviour with multiple methods: (1) a quantitative behavioural assessment will determine the parameter space for hawkmoth pattern vision, and (2) intracellular recordings will provide the first characterisation of pattern-responsive neurons in the insect brain. To bridge from behaviour to physiology, (3) tetrode recordings in hawkmoths that actively scan patterns in virtual reality will reveal how patterns are encoded in behaving insects and how active vision contributes to pattern encoding.
The outcomes of this research programme will be highly instructive for vision research, neuroscience, and sensory ecology. The neural mechanisms described in hawkmoths will lay the basis for comparative investigations across insect species. Together with a quantitative assessment of natural flower patterns, this work will enrich our understanding of the most-diverse of animal groups, which crucially impact global ecosystems as pollinators. Comparing the pattern processing strategies of hawkmoths to that in vertebrates will reveal converging neural strategies, as well as diverging solutions that insects use to cope with their distinctly lower processing power. Together, this project will deliver key contributions to the fields of animal vision, neuroscience, sensory ecology, computer vision and robotics.