Behavioral responses to a repetitive visual threat stimulus express a persistent state of defensive arousal in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: The neural circuit mechanisms underlying emotion states remain poorly understood. Drosophila offers powerful genetic approaches for dissecting neural circuit function, but whether flies exhibit emotion-like behaviors has not been clear. We recently proposed that model organisms may express internal states displaying "emotion primitives," which are general characteristics common to different emotions, rather than specific anthropomorphic emotions such as "fear" or "anxiety." These emotion primitives include scalability, persistence, valence, and generalization to multiple contexts. Here, we have applied this approach to determine whether flies' defensive responses to moving overhead translational stimuli ("shadows") are purely reflexive or may express underlying emotion states. We describe

SUBMITTER: Gibson WT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4452410 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature