Heisenberg's roadmap guides our journey to the small cognitive world of Drosophila.
Professor Martin Heisenberg is one of the pioneers in the exploration of neuroethology. With his inspiration and earnest help, we employed the fruitfly as a model system to investigate the underlying neural mechanism of cognitive behaviors. Here, we recalled the help from Martin in the early years and introduced some findings from our lab about visual cognition behaviors in Drosophila, such as decision making, selective attention, and experience-dependent visual pattern recognition. From the results so far, the circuit composed of mushroom bodies, central complex, and dopaminergic neurons may play an essential role in these behaviors.
Guo
Aike
A
Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China. akguo@ion.ac.cn
Zhang
Ke
K
Peng
Yueqing
Y
Xi
Wang
W
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D004330:Drosophila / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology