Features of the surround important for Drosophila visual place memory
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1
Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Visitor Program, United States
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2
Columbia University Medical Center, Department of Neuroscience, United States
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3
Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
How do the nervous systems of animals learn and later use spatial information about their environments? Visually guided navigation has been extensively studied across a range of species, such as desert ants [1] and bats [2]. Recent work demonstrated that Drosophila melanogaster can use cues from the visual surround to learn and subsequently recall the location of a cool spot within an otherwise heated floor . Modern molecular-genetic methods revealed that certain ring neurons of the ellipsoid body, but not Kenyon Cells of the mushroom bodies, are required for the immediate recall of the cool location [3].
The previous work made use of a consistent visual panorama for all studies. As such, the specific aspects of the visual pattern that flies used as the basis for visual memories could not be addressed. In the original experiments, flies were trained to locate a cool spot using a visual pattern. During a final ‘probe’ trial, no cool spot exists, but flies that have learned the location of the cool spot exhibit a pronounced search bias in the location predicted by the visual surround.
To investigate which features of the experimental pattern are important for visual place memory, an altered-probe experiment was designed. In these experiments, the visual pattern has been altered in a slight, and hopefully meaningful, way during the probe trial. Such alterations include inverting the pattern contrast or masking a part of the pattern. The search bias of the fly during this altered probe trial is used to determine whether the modified pattern can support the learned visual association.
Using these experiments, we observe that wild-type flies use the lowest part of the pattern for navigation and are insensitive to contrast inversion. The former result may agree with findings from field experiments on the Australian ant Melophorus bagoti, a model system for visually guided insect navigation [4]. The latter result rules out a rigid intensity-based template-matching strategy that flies could be using to determine their position relative to the visual panorama. Although indirect, these experiments provide a method to probe fly visual perception, since the animal’s search behavior can be used as a proxy for the similarity of the altered pattern to the original one used during training.
References
[1] Wehner, R., Michel, B., and Antonsen, P. Visual navigation in insects: Coupling of egocentric and geocentric information. JEB. 199 129-140 (1996).
[2] Tsoar, A., et al. Large-scale navigational map in a mammal. PNAS. 108 15031-15032 (2011).
[3] Ofstad, T.A., Zuker, C.S., and Reiser, M.B. Visual place learning in Drosophila melanogaster. Nature. 474 204-209 (2011).
[4] Graham, P., and Cheng, K. Which portion of the natural panorama is used for view-based navigation in the Australian desert ant? J Comp Physiol A. 195 681-689 (2009).
Keywords:
navigation,
Vision
Conference:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster (but consider for participant symposium and student poster award)
Topic:
Orientation and Navigation
Citation:
Florence
T,
Zuker
CS and
Reiser
MB
(2012). Features of the surround important for Drosophila visual place memory.
Conference Abstract:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00345
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Received:
30 Apr 2012;
Published Online:
07 Jul 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. TJ Florence, Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Visitor Program, Ashburn, VA, 20147, United States, florencet@janelia.hhmi.org