Modeling the Detection of Motion Direction Signals in the Visual Cortex of Flies

Vision motion-detection is one of the most active areas in neuroscience today. Several nonlinear differential equations are derived to model the dendrities which carry information to the tangential cells in the fly’s visual cortex and to model the dynamics in the synaptic inputs. We analyze the solutions of these equations derived under both the preferred direction and the null direction of a tangential cell in the visual cortex of fly. It is found that when the parameters are within a certain range, these mathematical models can explain how the visual system of the fly encodes motion signals like the change of direction. This knowledge may be used to design an electrical circuit whose function can be expressed as the differential equations and then can be used to detect change in the motion direction.