Abstract
Caudo-rostral whole-field visual motion elicits forward locomotion in many organisms, including larval zebrafish. Here, we investigate the dependence on the latency to initiate this forward swimming as a function of the speed of the visual motion. We show that latency is highly dependent on speed for slow speeds (<10 mm s-1) and then plateaus for higher values. Typical latencies are >1.5 s, which is much longer than neuronal transduction processes. What mechanisms underlie these long latencies? We propose two alternative, biologically inspired models that could account for this latency to initiate swimming: an integrate and fire model, which is history dependent, and a stochastic Poisson model, which has no history dependence. We use these models to predict the behavior of larvae when presented with whole-field motion of varying speed and find that the stochastic process shows better agreement with the experimental data. Finally, we discuss possible neuronal implementations of these models.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1433-1443 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Biology |
Volume | 218 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 May 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Locomotion initiation
- Optomotor response
- Zebrafish