Speaker
Description
It has been demonstrated that Drosophila melanogaster and other insects are capable of associating locations in space with rewards and use this knowledge later on, but the concrete mechanisms underlying this ability are not entirely understood. This project aims to shed light into the specific sensory and motor features underlying visual place learning in insects.
Because of its many experimental advantages and complex navigational behaviors, which are replicable in artificial and controlled lab conditions, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a great model for studying visual place learning. In addition, due to the high conservation of navigational brain structures across arthropods and vertebrates, the findings generated in this project can be extended to other insects and animal systems.
We will look at the fly’s exploratory behavior in a featureless world and in the presence of different visual landmarks projected on the floor instead of vertical visual panoramas. Next, we will introduce a fixed cool spot in a heated arena as a reward, marked by an exactly overlapping landmark projection. Flies will be trained in this setup and then tested without any reward. While walking flies explore these virtual worlds, we will quantitatively analyze the movement strategies they take.
Together, these experiments will allow us to understand 1) whether flies can learn to associate projected landmarks on the floor with a reward, 2) how they may use this visual-based learning to find a reward in a quicker or more efficient way via changes in their navigational strategy, 3) which visual features are most important for place memory formation, 4) whether flies show local search behavior in our setup and 5) how this search behavior interacts with the visual memory obtained during training.
The projected findings of the experimental part of this project will be significant for understanding more about the navigational mechanisms of the fruit fly and insects in general when it comes to place learning and exploratory/search behaviors, with possible applications for bio-inspired robotics.
| Field of Research/Work | Beyond Physics |
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