Research Projects

Animals use various sensory streams to navigate their world, with insects utilizing vision and olfaction. The insect brain encodes visual orientation, while neurons in the mushroom bodies and lateral horns encode odor valence. The exact mechanisms of the integration of these information streams remain poorly understood. Researchers propose to investigate how neuronal activity from visual, olfactory, and mechanosensory streams are integrated in the insect brain using a locust, a sturdy and large insect with an accessible brain for neuronal recording. The study will involve constructing a virtual reality environment where visual patterns will be projected onto the insect's eyes, and an olfactometer will deliver odors to its antennae. Neuronal activities will be extracellularly recorded while the animal receives various input patterns. The researchers aim to identify the fundamental principles underlying the integration of these information streams. The research will test simple horizontal and vertical stripes as visual input, along with odors of positive, negative, and neutral valence, presented differentially to the two antennae. Electrophysiological recordings will identify single-unit activity correlated to these stimuli, decoding the underlying neural computation for combining these stimuli. The research will address an important open question in neuroscience: how multisensory-integration works at the neurophysiological level and provide insights into the mechanisms underlying navigational computation in the brain. The results can be applied in neuromorphic engineering and biomimetic artificial intelligence algorithms with applications in search-and-rescue robots, agriculture, and defense.