Trends in Neurosciences
Volume 27, Issue 12, December 2004, Pages 707-711
Journal home page for Trends in Neurosciences

Cognitive consonance: complex brain functions in the fruit fly and its relatives

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The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has become a model for the study of a growing number of human characteristics because of the power of its genetics. Higher cognitive functions, however, might be assumed to be out of reach for the little fly. But the cumulative history of cognitive studies in insects and some of their arachnid relatives, as well as specific probing of the capabilities of fruit flies, suggests that even in this ethereal realm these creatures have much to contribute. What are the degrees of sophistication in cognitive behavior displayed by these organisms, how have they been demonstrated, and what is their potential for understanding how our own brains work?

Section snippets

The honeybee

The sophistication of honeybee cognition was first suggested by von Frisch's pioneering studies of honeybee foraging. He demonstrated not only that scouts have the ability to translate their experience of finding a nectar source into a sophisticated set of signals, the ‘dance’, but also that the observers of this dance have the ability to translate it into a sequence of navigational maneuvers [1]. These abilities are suggestive of the presence of explicit memory, a high-level cognitive function

The jumping spider

Anticipatory maze learning has been demonstrated in salticid jumping spiders of the genus Portia. These animals are presented with a maze that can be viewed in its entirety from the vantage point of the spider. The maze consists of a set of wire walkways representing potential paths from the starting position to that of a food lure placed at the maze endpoint (Figure 1). One route reaches the food but the other does not. After scanning of the entire maze, visually following the tracks back from

The fruit fly

The fruit fly would appear to be a cognitive poor cousin to the honeybee and jumping spider. But the same can be said of virtually all other invertebrates, few, if any, of which have been studied in this way. Key to the apparent success of the honeybee and jumping spider is the ethological verisimilitude of the paradigms used in studying them. Because both species display cognitively sophisticated food foraging behavior, these behaviors became prime targets for further probing. Ethological

How do they do it?

Do these invertebrates accomplish such feats by an altogether different mechanism than we do? Or does their divergent anatomy subserve a functionally similar neural strategy of association, integration, abstraction and categorization? The answer to these questions can come only from direct analysis of real-time neural activity in the insect brain during cognitive and perceptual events.

Despite the high level of sophistication in evidence in their visual behaviors (and in the tests designed to

A physiological signature for ‘attentiveness’ in the fruit fly

Ironically, it is in the smaller brain of the fruit fly that the most recent contribution to a systems physiology of visual perception in insects has appeared. (That these results were not obtained sooner is perhaps because the expectation for single-cell recording in fruit flies was never very great, although this has now been accomplished [29]). The recording of local field potentials (LFPs) under conditions where the fly exhibits a behavior analogous to selective attention reveals a

Spatiotemporal correlations and perception

Perceptual mechanisms of selective attention in mammals have been associated with temporal correlations in neuronal activity between different brain regions 44, 45. In monkeys, selective attention has been shown to correlate with specific patterns of coherent activity in cortical neurons [46], especially those firing in the gamma frequency (35–80 Hz) range 47, 48. Similarly, in a study of conscious perception in humans, using the alternating percepts produced in binocular rivalry, the conscious

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