Temporal and spatial receptive field characteristics of tectal neurons in zebrafish larvae [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Bettina Reiter

Temporal and spatial receptive field characteristics of tectal neurons in zebrafish larvae Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Naturwissenschaften der Fakultät für Biologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München vorgelegt von Bettina Reiter 9. Dezember 2005 1. Gutachter: Prof Tobias Bonhoeffer (Vorsitz der Pruefung) 2. Gutachter: Prof . Benedikt Grothe 3. Pruefer: Prof. Rainer Uhl 4. Pruefer: Prof. Sebastian Diehl (Protokoll) Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 21.3.2006 CONTENTS CONTENTS 3 1 SUMMARY 5 2 INTRODUCTION 7 2.1 The visual system in zebrafish and visually induced behavior 7 2.2 Information coding in neuronal signals 11 2.3 Measuring visual encoding properties 12 2.4 Modeling visual response properties 17 2.5 Structure of the thesis 21 3 METHODS 23 3.1 Fish preparation and electrophysiology 23 3.2 Visual stimulation 24 3.3 Data analysis 28 3.4 Stimulus protocol summary: 32 4 RESULTS 33 4.1 Responses to visual stimuli 33 4.1.1 Responses to whole field light flashes 34 4.1.2 temporal receptive field properties 36 4.1.3 Static receptive fields 41 4.1.4 Receptive fields measured with spatially filtered noise 47 4.1.5 Size query 51 4.1.6 Responses to natural movies 51 4.2 Modeled responses 51 4.2.1 successful predictions 51 4.2.2 prediction failures 51 5 DISCUSSION 51 5.1 Methodological considerations 51 5.2 Spatial receptive fields 51 5.