title: Whole-field visual motion drives swimming in larval zebrafish via a stochastic process.
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.
authors: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Sensorimotor Control Research Group, Martinsried 82152, Germany rportugues@neuro.mpg.de.
authors: Ruben
authors: R
authors: Portugues
authors: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors: Martin
authors: M
authors: Haesemeyer
authors: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors: Mirella L
authors: ML
authors: Blum
authors: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors: Florian
authors: F
authors: Engert
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D013550:Swimming; D014794:Visual Fields; D015027:Zebrafish / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Locomotion initiation; Optomotor response; Zebrafish