Last updated July 11, 2018 at 10:43 am
Study finds there are two parts to the process.
Credit: iStock
The humble zebrafish has provided insights into how the brain perceives and reacts to predators, and potentially into the mechanisms that underpin some psychiatric disorders in humans.
For her PhD, Dr Lucy Heap from the Queensland Brain Institute tested how zebrafish respond to a large threatening shape moving towards them.
“We found that visual information received from the eyes was broken down into components, such as shapes and brightness,” she said. “These components then needed to be processed separately by two different parts of the brain for the fish to respond appropriately.
“When a visual threat appeared, cells in a particular part of the brain, the thalamus, lit up. But if we interfered with activity in the thalamus, the fish failed to recognise the threat and did not swim away.
Associate Professor Ethan Scott from the University of Queensland’s School of Biomedical Sciences said the processing of visual threats by the brain represented an interesting puzzle in neuroscience.
“Animals ranging from insects to humans will try to escape physically in response to a visual threat,” Dr Scott said. “But we don’t know how the brain recognises that the stimulus is threatening or decides to escape.
“Because zebrafish larvae are small and transparent, we examined activity across the entire brain using microscopes while visual threats were presented. This gave us a window into the brain’s responses.”
Heap says her findings help complete our picture of how different sensory information travels through the brain, and how the brain represents the outside world.
“Because these functions are abnormal in patients with certain psychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia, this work sets the stage for deeper studies into the disorders’ basic mechanisms,” she said.
The paper published in Neuron.
