Preeti Sareen

Brigham & Women’s Hospital

Attention span of a fly is not just a figure of speech

 

The visual environment of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) is cluttered with information, just like ours. During flight, the amount of visual information changing with time is enormous and flies need a good mechanism to process the relevant information and filter out the irrelevant noise. Not much research has been done in this field and a systematic assessment of attention in Drosophila is lacking even though an elaborate genetic toolbox is available for dissecting the underlying neuronal circuits. I will present an investigation of visual cuing of attention and describe some of its properties. Results from tethered flight studies in a visual arena suggest that flies can actively shift their attention, as well as their attention can be guided to a certain location by external cues. The cue can precede the test stimulus by several seconds and may be spatially separated from the test by at least 20° and yet attract attention. This kind of external guidance of attention is found only in the lower visual field of Drosophila.