ABSTRACT
The visual systems of insects and vertebrates have evolved independently, yet both groups live in the same world and have comparable repertoires of visual behavior. The neural anatomy of the insect optic lobes is rather conservative, and so although most anatomical studies are from the fly, these are, in general, applicable to the locust. This chapter describes the physiology of the locust. The sustaining cells of the medulla have a range of spatial, temporal, and spectral properties, but their responses are essentially linear. Like the sustaining cells, transient cells are a diverse physiological class. Perhaps to understand the functions either of the transient or of the sustaining cell classes, we need to consider how their neural representations might be combined in later processing. For example, the locust’s transient cells could abstract a set of object border primitives suited to making a primary segmentation of the image.
