Abstract
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a sophisticated visual system and exhibits complex visual behaviors. Visual responses, vision processing and higher cognitive processes in Drosophila have been studied extensively. However, little is known about whether the retinal location of visual stimuli can affect fruit fly performance in various visual tasks. We tested the response of wild-type Berlin flies to visual stimuli at several vertical locations. Three paradigms were used in our study: visual operant conditioning, visual object fixation and optomotor response. We observed an acute zone for visual feature memorization in the upper visual field when visual patterns were presented with a black background. However, when a white background was used, the acute zone was in the lower visual field. Similar to visual feature memorization, the best locations for visual object fixation and optomotor response to a single moving stripe were in the lower visual field with a white background and the upper visual field with a black background. The preferred location for the optomotor response to moving gratings was around the equator of the visual field. Our results suggest that different visual processing pathways are involved in different visual tasks and that there is a certain degree of overlap between the pathways for visual feature memorization, visual object fixation and optomotor response.
Highlights
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a sophisticated visual system and exhibits complex visual behaviors
The mean test preference index’’ (PI) for these locations exhibited tendencies similar to that described for the visual feature COGs, with a maximum value at h = 20u, there was no significant location dependence (p = 0.4485, Kruskal-Wallis test; Fig. 1E, bottom panel). These results suggest that there is an acute zone in the upper visual field (10–20u above the equator of the compound eyes) of wild-type Berlin (WTB) flies that is necessary for memorizing the visual features of patterns on a black background
The learning effect indicated by the yaw torque magnitude in the training session To better understand the role of the acute zone in the upper visual field of WTB flies, the results described above were analyzed in detail
Summary
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a sophisticated visual system and exhibits complex visual behaviors. Some fast-flying insects such as blowflies and dragonflies have a region with a high density of ommatidia in their eyes. This region, which is referred to as the acute zone, is useful for hunting prey or for pursuing potential mates in flight [15,16]. The Drosophila eye does not contain obvious large facets, the ommatidia are not homogeneously distributed and are densest in the frontal area around the equator of the eyes, while the left and right eyes share a small receptive field in the frontal area [17]. Ommatidia in the ventral eye were recently reported to mediate polarotactic responses in Drosophila [19]
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