Main Focus
In 1960 the Max Planck Society offered Werner Reichardt an independent
department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. Through
his initiative this department was to become the foundation of todays
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. Here he worked as head of the department Information Processing in Insects up to
his retirement in 1992. His research focused on the processing of
information in the nervous system of Drosophila and helped
clarify vision in motion. Together with Bernhard Hassenstein and Hans
Wenking he analyzed the properties of the insect sight and its influence
on the flight orientation. In 1977 Werner Reichardt 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.
Information Processing in Insects