Andrea Gonsek

Hello there! I am curious about how insects perceive their environment and want to understand the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of sensory information.

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In my PhD I will investigate how the visual system of hawkmoths processes highly dynamic visual inputs based on natural sceneries!

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I will first use flight trajectories of hawkmoths to make recordings of natural visual sceneries along their travelled path. Based on these recordings, I want to quantify the visual information in natural environments for two hawkmoth species - the diurnal hummingbird hawkmoth and the nocturnal elephant hawkmoth. By doing intracellular recordings, I aim to reveal how the spatiotemporal tuning of early visual neurons adjusts to rapidly changing light intensities of their natural environment.