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Abstract

The functional properties of the three horizontal cells (north horizontal cell, HSN; equatorial horizontal cell, HSE; south horizontal cell, HSS) in the lobula plate of the blowflyCalliphora erythrocephala were investigated electrophysiologically. 1. The receptive fields of the HSN, HSE, and HSS cover the dorsal, equatorial and ventral part of the ipsilateral visual field, respectively. In all three cells, the sensitivity to visual stimulation is highest in the frontal visual field and decreases laterally. The receptive fields and spatial sensitivity distributions of the horizontal cells are directly determined by the position and extension of their dendritic fields in the lobula plate and the dendritic density distributions within these fields. 2. The horizontal cells respond mainly to progressive (front to back) motion and are inhibited by motion in the reverse direction, the preferred and null direction being antiparallel. The amplitudes of motion induced excitatory and inhibitory responses decline like a cosine function with increasing deviation of the direction of motion from the preferred direction. Stimulation with motion in directions perpendicular to the preferred direction is ineffective. 3. The preferred directions of the horizontal cells show characteristic gradual orientation changes in different parts of the receptive fields: they are horizontally oriented only in the equatorial region and increasingly tilted vertically towards the dorsofrontal and ventrofrontal margins of the visual field. These orientation changes can be correlated with equivalent changes in the local orientation of the lattice of ommatidial axes in the pertinent compound eye. 4. The response amplitudes of the horizontal cells under stimulation with a moving periodic grating depend strongly on the contrast frequency of the stimulus. Maximal responses were found at contrast frequencies of 2–5 Hz. 5. The spatial integration properties of the horizontal cells (studied in the HSE) are highly nonlinear. Under stimulation with extended moving patterns, their response amplitudes are nearly independent of the size of the stimuli. It is demonstrated that this response behaviour does not result from postsynaptic saturation in the dendrites of the cells. The results indicate that the horizontal system is essentially involved in the neural control of optomotor torque responses performed by the fly in order to minimize unvoluntary deviations from a straight flight course.