Central complex and mushroom bodies mediate novelty choice behavior in Drosophila

Abstract

Novelty choice, a visual paired-comparison task, for the fly Drosophila melanogaster is studied with severely restrained single animals in a flight simulator. The virtual environment simulates free flight for rotation in the horizontal plane. The behavior has three functional components: visual azimuth orientation, working memory, and pattern discrimination (perception). Here we study novelty choice in relation to its neural substrate in the brain and show that it requires the central complex and, in particular, the ring neurons of the ellipsoid body. Surprisingly, it also involves the mushroom bodies which are needed specifically in the comparison of patterns of different sizes.

Keywords:

• Brain
• flight simulator
• pattern recognition
• size discrimination

Acknowledgement

We thank A. Haberberger for technical assistance, the Department of Neurobiology and Genetics, Biozentrum Würzburg for support in fly maintenance, as well as the mechanics workshop (H. Kaderschabek) and the electronics workshop (K. Oechsner) of the Biozentrum for technical support. H. Tanimoto, R. Strauss, and T. Raabe kindly provided fly stocks. We thank the two reviewers for interesting suggestions. The project was funded by the German Science Foundation (Reinhard Koselleck Project; He986/20-1).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.