Motivational Vision – Revealing an essential but unexplored part of animal visual systems

In this project we will reveal the function of an unexplored but fundamental part of animal visual systems. This part contributes to assessment of the habitat and to the brain’s master control of behaviour.

These visual functions contribute to setting the ecological role of each species and determine their spatiotemporal distribution.All animals need to find their preferred habitat and continuously select currently relevant behaviours from their repertoire.

To accomplish this, they combine sensory information about the external world with their internal conditions to set a behavioural state. This will act as a master control on the choice of behaviour and determine where to be and what to do. Behavioural choices are of fundamental biological importance to animals and to the ecosystems they are part of.

The rich input to behavioural states that potentially comes from the visual system feeds into yet unexplored visual functions that are crucial for vertebrates and invertebrates alike.

Here, we plan to use carefully selected invertebrate model-species and unique virtual-reality techniques to uncover this essential part of animal visual systems and reveal the codes of visual information that underly behavioural choices.

This pioneering project will explore an unknown part of animal visual systems and open major and important new fields of study in sensory biology, behavioural ecology and neurobiology, with a huge potential for applications in many different fields.