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Invisible noise obscures visible signal in insect motion detection

Ghaith Tarawneh, Vivek Nityananda, Ronny Rosner, Steven Errington, William Herbert, Bruce G. Cumming, Jenny C. A. Read, Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098459
Ghaith Tarawneh
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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Vivek Nityananda
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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Ronny Rosner
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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Steven Errington
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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William Herbert
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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Bruce G. Cumming
2Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bldg 49 Room2A50, Bethesda, MD 20892-4435, USA
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Jenny C. A. Read
1Institute of Neuroscience, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, United Kingdom
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Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza
3Faculty of Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid 28223, Spain
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1 Abstract

The motion energy model is the standard account of motion detection in animals from beetles to humans. Despite this common basis, we show here that a difference in the early stages of visual processing between mammals and insects leads this model to make radically different behavioural predictions. In insects, early filtering is spatially lowpass, which makes the surprising prediction that motion detection can be impaired by “invisible” noise, i.e. noise at a spatial frequency that elicits no response when presented on its own as a signal. We confirm this prediction using the optomotor response of praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola. This does not occur in mammals, where spatially bandpass early filtering means that linear systems techniques, such as deriving channel sensitivity from masking functions, remain approximately valid. Counter-intuitive effects such as masking by invisible noise may occur in neural circuits wherever a nonlinearity is followed by a difference operation.

Footnotes

  • (ghaith.tarawneh{at}ncl.ac.uk), (+44 191 208 6246)

  • (vivek.nityananda{at}ncl.ac.uk), (+44 191 208 6246)

  • (ronny.rosner{at}ncl.ac.uk), (+44 191 208 6246)

  • (steven.errington{at}ncl.ac.uk), (+44 191 208 6246)

  • (williamherbert{at}hotmail.co.uk), (+44 191 208 6246)

  • (bgc{at}mail.nih.gov), (+1 301 402 8097)

  • (jenny.read{at}ncl.ac.uk), (+44 191 208 7559)

  • (iserrano{at}ucm.es), (+34 91 394 2340)

  • Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no financial or non-financial competing interests.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 07, 2017.
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Invisible noise obscures visible signal in insect motion detection
Ghaith Tarawneh, Vivek Nityananda, Ronny Rosner, Steven Errington, William Herbert, Bruce G. Cumming, Jenny C. A. Read, Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza
bioRxiv 098459; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098459
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Invisible noise obscures visible signal in insect motion detection
Ghaith Tarawneh, Vivek Nityananda, Ronny Rosner, Steven Errington, William Herbert, Bruce G. Cumming, Jenny C. A. Read, Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza
bioRxiv 098459; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098459

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