The lab ultimately seeks to understand how animals perceive and process complex social stimuli in the central brain and the mechanisms that give rise to these circuits’ development. We primarily work with a special paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, whose females posses individually distinctive color patches on their face which they use to discriminate among each other on the nest. During my postdoc I identified a brain region and a physiological cell type that likely plays a role in this ability and the Jernigan Lab will continue to work to better characterize this system, the neural circuits involved, and what is different in young and socially naive animals. Current projects in the lab focus on how these circuits develop and how experience or lack-there-of shapes the tuning properties of this neural population. Ultimately this work will allow us to test ideas about fundamental principles guiding specialized visual and social recognition circuits by comparing the circuit organization in this special wasp to the known visual circuits features in invertebrate and vertebrate systems. Additionally, this work will allow for further exploration and circuit decoding of visual object processing in the insect protocerebrum and higher-order processing in the insect brain, which largely remains a black box.  Face cells in primates have allowed for a decoding of mammalian visual cortex, due to the highly specific nature of these circuits. The lab leverages the unique features of  Polistes fuscatus to decode the insect visual central brain in a similar manner. There is a lot to do and we are very excited to be at the forefront of this work together with the next generation of insect neuroscientists!

Vision & Social processing in paper wasps

Multichannel electrophysiology (play with sound)
Paper wasps use a range of visual signals to communicate identity or fighting ability. The lab primarily studies vision and neural correlates of individual face recognition in female Northern paper wasps, Polistes fuscatus. Using an isolation treatment that prevents the development of facial recognition in this species colleagues and I have previously identified a candidate brain region involved with this unique ability, the Anterior optic tubercle (AOTu). The AOTu is a visual glomerulus in the insect protocerebrum that in other insects is known be involved in color processing, object-background discrimination, and female-female aggression. All aspects we would expect for a candidate 'face' processing region. This is further supported by our finding that color is required for specialized face recognition in this species! The lab is currently working hard to characterize visual processing in this system. We have recently identified a face cell-like neural unit in these wasps, I call wasp cells. These cells show specific selectivity for frontal views of wasps and are relatively unresponsive to other visual stimuli. They are also localized to the lateral protocerebrum, near the AOTu. Additionally these cells seem to show tuning to a particular axis of wasp 'face space', similar to the tuning properties of neurons in face patches of primates.

Complex Signal Integration and  Object  Processing
Signals in nature are more than single modality or single feature stimuli. The lab will continue to push the naturalism and complexity of stimuli to understand how complex signals and objects are processed by the brain. There is a lot to do here, but in the immediate future work will seek to understand how objects are processed in the central brain to give rise to the neural percepts of "wasp" "familiar", "novel", "nestmate", "dominant", etc. We will incorporate olfactory signals into these stimuli as well to allow us to understand how vision and olfaction interact to give rise to the complex concepts described above.

Other Projects
As a neuroethologist the nature of my work is highly integrative and therefore highly collaborative. I have developed many collaborative projects with colleagues from computer scientists to virologists and everything in between. To name a few, I've worked on developing software for tracking bees and tracking antennae. I've developed stimuli for identifying what stimuli bees are using to identify the threat of giant asian hornets. I'm also working on projects to develop tools to get cell-specific neural indicators into the nervous system of social insects!