What the brain sees during predator-prey interactions of sky and ground-based animals

Abstract: During mortal behaviors such as predator/prey interactions, where the motivation for success is high, the fidelity of the information encoded by the senses is critical for survival as this must contain both the opponent’s location as well as the changing relationship to the environment during the chase. This poses potentially opposing requirements on the visual system for the predator and the prey, and raises the question of how the different visual systems enable a successful behavioral outcome. Our lab is primarily interested in the neural circuitry activity and behavioral strategies underlying predator prey interactions for a variety of animal species. To measure, reconstruct and quantify sensory information during prey capture and prey detection, we have developed a number of high-resolution techniques that allow motion of the environment and objects, such as prey, to be measured in the visual systems of freely moving animals, both in the laboratory and wild. By combining these behavioral quantification approaches with anatomical reconstructions of visual pathway componentry we have been able to quantify both the behavioral and common visual system strategies that a number of ground-dwelling and airborne animals employ during predator prey interactions to ensure either avoidance or capture. Lastly, we have started to image neuronal activity simultaneously from all visual cortex layers during these freely moving behaviors and have started to unravel a mechanism of how the visual cortex enables detection of environmental features in very low light levels.

Bio: Jason Kerr studied human anatomy at the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his Bachelor's degree in 1994 and his Diploma in Human Anatomy in 1995. Until 1999, he conducted research for his doctorate in neurophysiology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. This was followed by two postdoctoral positions: first, from 1999 to the end of 2003, at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and then, until 2005, at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Kerr remained in the department of Prof. Dr. Bert Sakmann as a project leader until 2006, after which he became head of the Network Imaging Group at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. Since September 2013, Jason Kerr has been Director of the Department of Brain and Behavior Organization at the caesar research center. He is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and a member of the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne. In November 2019, he was appointed Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Bonn. Kerr's long-term research goal is to understand how mammals make decisions based on their sense of sight and what neurobiological mechanisms underlie this process.

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