Multi-stability with ambiguous visual stimuli in Drosophila orientation behavior.

ABSTRACT: It is widely accepted for humans and higher animals that vision is an active process in which the organism interprets the stimulus. To find out whether this also holds for lower animals, we designed an ambiguous motion stimulus, which serves as something like a multi-stable perception paradigm in Drosophila behavior. Confronted with a uniform panoramic texture in a closed-loop situation in stationary flight, the flies adjust their yaw torque to stabilize their virtual self-rotation. To make the visual input ambiguous, we added a second texture. Both textures got a rotatory bias to move into opposite directions at a constant relative angular velocity. The results indicate that the fly now had three possible frames of reference for self-rotation: either of the two motion components as well a

SUBMITTER: Toepfer F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5826666 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature