The departments research focused on the processing of information in the nervous system of Drosophila and helped clarify vision in motion. In 1977 they had a successful breakthrough, when discovering that flies use motion discontinuities in their visual surroundings to distinguish objects from the background. Flies turn towards a single, randomly textured stripe in front of an equally textured background, but only as long as it moves relative to the ground. [more]

The research in this department was based on the combination of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology with brain theory, with the aim to understand mechanisms of brain functions. Main fields of research were the visual system of the fly, cerebellum and the physiology of movement, and structure and function of the cerebral cortex. Some topics on the cerebral cortex were: quantitative-anatomical studies on connectivity, orientation specificity in the visual cortex of primates, as well as a neurological theory of language. [more]

The research in the department focused on the optomotoric reactions and the neural basics of the orientation of Drosophila. They used neurological mutants of Drosophila to reveal how genetic instructions are translated into functional structures of the fly's central nervous system. [more]

The main research interests of the department were the primary processes and photo transduction in the photoreceptors of insects, physiological optics, visual pigments and the ion regulation in the nervous system. Furthermore the processing of visual information in insects and vertebrates and the influence of common anesthesia on the nervous system were compared. [more]