Our brains help us navigate by using a compressed code for what we see when we move

What is it about?

As we move through the environment or see something moving, visual motion appears as structured patterns of light on our retinas (called "optic flow") that change over time. Neurons in a brain area known as the medial superior temporal (MST) area play a major role in visually guided navigation, as they are experts at analyzing these moving patterns of light. Some neurons respond to a specific direction of travel ("heading"), so that we always know where we're going. However, more often than not, MST responses are complex and non-intuitive, making it hard to understand how these neurons operate. This study challenges the way we think about MST. Rather than serving specific behavioral functions, such as encoding heading, neurons in MST might simply be trying to find a compressed representation of all possible, naturally occurring optic flow patterns—such that self-motion analysis is always both accurate and efficient.

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Why is it important?

This is a new way of thinking about self-motion processing in MSTd, suggesting that most observed MSTd response properties might be due to an underlying computational or organizational principle, such as dimensionality reduction.