RobustCircuit PI Marion Silies has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant to study ‘Adaptive functions of visual systems’. In this work, the Silies team will investigate the processing of visual information that allows humans, animals, and computer-vision based machines to navigate the world. All visual systems face common challenges when the world rapidly changes, but individual challenges depend on the animal’s own behavior. The first goal of this project is to study common principles of visual system function, and to then work out how diverse visual systems adapt to specific environmental and behavioral constraints.
To achieve this, Marion Silies and her team will study two essential visual computations, the robust estimation of contrast in dynamically changing environments, and the encoding of global motion cues generated by self-motion. For both topics, they first will study the molecular and circuit mechanisms of visual computation in D.melanogaster. Second, a comparative approach will answer how diverse visual systems adapt to the individual constraints brought about by the environments and by the animal’s own behavior. Together, this work is devised to increase our understanding of the molecular basis of the evolution of visual computation.
