title: Continuous lateral oscillations as a core mechanism for taxis inDrosophilalarvae.
abstract: Taxis behaviour inDrosophilalarva is thought to consist of distinct control mechanisms triggering specific actions. Here, we support a simpler hypothesis: that taxis results from direct sensory modulation of continuous lateral oscillations of the anterior body, sparing the need for 'action selection'. Our analysis of larvae motion reveals a rhythmic, continuous lateral oscillation of the anterior body, encompassing all head-sweeps, small or large, without breaking the oscillatory rhythm. Further, we show that an agent-model that embeds this hypothesis reproduces a surprising number of taxis signatures observed in larvae. Also, by coupling the sensory input to a neural oscillator in continuous time, we show that the mechanism is robust and biologically plausible. The mechanism provides a simple architecture for combining information across modalities, and explaining how learnt associations modulate taxis. We discuss the results in the light of larval neural circuitry and make testable predictions.
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.|Centre de recherche sur la cognition animal, CNRS, Universite de Toulouse, Toulouse, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wystrach
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Konstantinos
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9349-801X
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lagogiannis
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Webb
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D004330:Drosophila / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D007814:Larva / Q000502:physiology; D008124:Locomotion; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: D. melanogaster; Drosophila Larva; computational biology; insect orientation; neural oscillator; neuroscience; sensorimotor loop; systems biology; taxis