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Science 16 November 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5546, pp. 1543 - 1547
DOI: 10.1126/science.1058237
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Reports

Choice Behavior of Drosophila Facing Contradictory Visual Cues

Shiming Tang,1 Aike Guo12*

We studied the underlying neural mechanism of a simple choice behavior between competing alternatives in Drosophila. In a flight simulator, individual flies were conditioned to choose one of two flight paths in response to color and shape cues; after the training, they were tested with contradictory cues. Wild-type flies made a discrete choice that switched from one alternative to the other as the relative salience of color and shape cues gradually changed, but this ability was greatly diminished in mutant (mbm1) flies with miniature mushroom bodies or with hydroxyurea ablation of mushroom bodies. Thus, Drosophila genetics may be useful for elucidating the neural basis of choice behavior.

1 Institute of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China.
2 Laboratory of Visual Information Processing, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: akguo{at}ion.ac.cn

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