Limulus vision in the marine environment
Limulus vision in the marine environment
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DOI：
10.2307/1543311
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发表时间：
2001-04-01
影响因子：
1.6
通讯作者：
Dodge, FA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Barlow, RB;Hitt, JM;Dodge, FA
马蹄蟹用视觉来寻找配偶。它们可以在各种光照条件下可靠地检测出与潜在配偶相似的物体。为了理解它们是如何实现这一非凡表现的，我们构建了一个基于细胞的侧眼真实模型，以计算它传输到大脑的视神经活动（“神经图像”）的集合。神经图像揭示了白天在水下移动的类似配偶的物体的强大编码。夜间的神经图像不太清晰，尽管眼睛的敏感度在昼夜节律中大幅增加，几乎可以补偿日落后水下照明的百万倍下降。在夜间，神经图像是嘈杂的，主要是在夜间低照度下发生的随机光子事件引起的神经脉冲爆发。通过低通时间和空间滤波，从第一个突触水平开始破译眼睛对大脑的输入。这两种神经过滤机制都改善了眼睛输入的信噪比，产生了更清晰的潜在伴侣的神经图像，特别是在晚上。通过相对简单的视觉系统的Limulus视觉处理的见解可能有助于海洋环境的机器人传感器的设计。
Horseshoe crabs use vision to find mates. They can reliably detect objects resembling potential mates under a variety of lighting conditions. To understand how they achieve this remarkable performance, we constructed a cell-based realistic model of the lateral eye to compute the ensembles of optic nerve activity ("neural images") it transmits to the brain. The neural images reveal a robust encoding of mate-like objects that move underwater during the day. The neural images are much less clear at night, even though the eyes undergo large circadian increases of sensitivity that nearly compensate for the millionfold decrease in underwater Lighting after sundown. At night the neural images are noisy, dominated by bursts of nerve impulses from random photon events that occur at low nighttime levels of illumination. Deciphering the eye's input to the brain begins at the first synaptic level with lowpass temporal and spatial filtering. Both neural filtering mechanisms improve the signal-to-noise properties of the eye's input, yielding clearer neural images of potential mates, especially at night. Insights about visual processing by the relatively simple visual system of Limulus may aid in the design of robotic sensors for the marine environment.