How vision shapes the neuronal organization of the fly brain

Many animals rely on vision to navigate their environment and to perform essential tasks such as foraging and courtship. The compact fly brain has evolved a specific neural architecture to extract behaviorally relevant visual features, establishing predictive links between anatomy, function, and behavior. In the first half of the talk, I'll introduce a computational framework that leverages whole-brain synapse-resolution connectome to predict neuronal function. In particular, we will look at how the geometry of the compound eye and the global arrangement of local motion detectors shape how flies detect their own movement. The second half of the talk expands this framework beyond motion vision, using an information propagation model to follow vision from photoreceptors through the entire brain, revealing a hierarchical network architecture as well as broadly distributed central brain pathways.