Trends in Neurosciences
Cognitive consonance: complex brain functions in the fruit fly and its relatives
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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Non-Elemental Learning in Invertebrates
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2017, European Journal of PharmacologyCitation Excerpt :Thus, it contains a compact genome size with a benefit of fast generation time (Celniker and Rubin, 2003); which makes it as a useful and applicable model for different genetic studies. D. melanogaster also exhibit various complex behaviors similar to mammals like learning and memory, orientation, courtship (Saunders, 1982), attention, feeding, expectancy, aggression, olfaction, gustation (Ueno et al., 2001), sleep, grooming, and flight navigation (Greenspan and Swinderen, 2004) and circadian rhythms (Chang, 2006). As the genes are responsible for the expression of all these behaviors, mutations in their genotype can be used as a tool to evaluate various behavioral parameters.
Questioning the interpretations of behavioral observations of cetaceans: Is there really support for a special intellectual status for this mammalian order?
2013, NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :Cetacean behavioral studies often mirror those undertaken on primates, with the primary goal of the cetacean studies being to show that anything a macaque monkey or chimpanzee can do, so can a bottlenose dolphin. Given the burgeoning field of insect cognitive studies (Greenspan and van Swinderen, 2004; Avarguès-Weber et al., 2011, 2012; Wu et al., 2013), it is probably far too early in the history of comparative cognitive studies to assert that possessing all the behaviors thought to be indicative of higher cognitive capacities in cetaceans means that they should be accorded a special status. Much of the current review of cetacean behavior has been directed toward contextualizing cetacean behavioral studies in the broader comparative context.
Cognition with few neurons: Higher-order learning in insects
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2013, NeuropharmacologyCitation Excerpt :These sophisticated cognitive functions allow us to have emotions, nurture our young and plan for the future. Nevertheless, the fly is capable of its own suite of complicated behaviors (Greenspan and van Swinderen, 2004), and the most basic behaviors of humans and flies are again shared. The plasticity of their nervous systems allows flies to habituate to sensory stimuli, and learn and form memories of associations through various training modules (Pitman et al., 2009).