march, 2023
Event Details
Young Jun (Jason) Jung, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Vision Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia will talk about “What can we learn from a highly visual marsupial, the tammar wallaby?” during the MBExC Lecture on March 29th, 2023 at 2 pm at the GZMB, Ernst-Caspari-Haus, Seminar room 0.232, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 11, 37077 Göttingen.
Abstract
It is 160 million years since metatherian (marsupial) and eutherian (placental) mammals shared a common ancestor. It has been known for many decades that marsupial brains lack the corpus callosum, which directly connects the two hemispheres of the cortex. This difference in brain anatomy is sometimes used to suggest that marsupial brains are “primitive” in comparison to eutherians, perhaps representing an early evolutionary experiment. Our recent research suggests that in fact marsupials have developed many of the same sophisticated processing traits as eutherians. We reported that visual feature maps in the primary visual cortex (V1) of an Australian marsupial, the wallaby, resemble those found in monkeys and cats, and are radically different to the design found in eutherian rodents, suggesting that marsupials retained or independently evolved common, sophisticated visual processing traits. We are also the first to describe the spatial features and nonlinear processing characteristics of the receptive fields (RFs) of individuals neurons in wallaby, using the latest novel analysis techniques. We find that the level of sophistication exceeds what is found in eutherian cat V1.
Host: Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf, CIDBN, University of Göttingen & MPI-DS
Poster of the talk 
