Larry Abbott - Columbia University
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Zoom opens: 10:30AM EDT
Seminar begins: 10:45AM EDT
Biological Systems for Spatial Orientation
I will discuss several topics related to how animals represent and update their sense of orientation in the world. In flies, this is done with a set of neurons that collectively form a ring-attractor network. Activity in this system indicates the azimuthal orientation of the fly. I will discuss how the polarization pattern of the sky is used as keep this encoded angle aligned with the physical world. Vertebrates have an analogous system for head orientation, but it is more complex. I will discuss various ways that a ring-attractor could be embedded in a large population of neurons, with results relevant for studies of the synaptic connections in these circuits. Finally, in both flies and vertebrates, these systems have been studied primarily in two dimension (that is, considering only yaw rotations). I will discuss different ideas about how they might respond to three-dimensional rotations.