Speaker: Caroline Holmes, Princeton University Department of Physics graduate student
Abstract: Organisms sense the world through arrays of receptor cells, such as photoreceptors on the retina. In cases such as the compound eyes of insects, these arrays are nearly crystalline, while in others, such as the human retina, sampling is much less regular. Ordered arrays gather more information, but this comes at the cost of specifying the positions of all the cells. We can build quantitative models of this tradeoff, which give predictions of the relationship between sensory information and positional entropy. We will also compare these predictions to data in the human retina.