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An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics

BACKGROUND: Mutations that cause learning and memory defects in Drosophila melanogaster have been found to also compromise visual responsiveness and attention. A better understanding of attention-like defects in such Drosophila mutants therefore requires a more detailed characterization of visual re...

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Autores principales: Evans, Oliver, Paulk, Angelique C., van Swinderen, Bruno
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126824/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21738736
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021619
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author Evans, Oliver
Paulk, Angelique C.
van Swinderen, Bruno
author_facet Evans, Oliver
Paulk, Angelique C.
van Swinderen, Bruno
author_sort Evans, Oliver
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Mutations that cause learning and memory defects in Drosophila melanogaster have been found to also compromise visual responsiveness and attention. A better understanding of attention-like defects in such Drosophila mutants therefore requires a more detailed characterization of visual responsiveness across a range of visual parameters. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We designed an automated behavioral paradigm for efficiently dissecting visual responsiveness in Drosophila. Populations of flies walk through multiplexed serial choice mazes while being exposed to moving visuals displayed on computer monitors, and infra-red fly counters at the end of each maze automatically score the responsiveness of a strain. To test our new design, we performed a detailed comparison between wild-type flies and a learning and memory mutant, dunce (1). We first confirmed that the learning mutant dunce (1) displays increased responsiveness to a black/green moving grating compared to wild type in this new design. We then extended this result to explore responses to a wide range of psychophysical parameters for moving gratings (e.g., luminosity, contrast, spatial frequency, velocity) as well as to a different stimulus, moving dots. Finally, we combined these visuals (gratings versus dots) in competition to investigate how dunce (1) and wild-type flies respond to more complex and conflicting motion effects. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We found that dunce (1) responds more strongly than wild type to high contrast and highly structured motion. This effect was found for simple gratings, dots, and combinations of both stimuli presented in competition.
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spelling pubmed-31268242011-07-07 An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics Evans, Oliver Paulk, Angelique C. van Swinderen, Bruno PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: Mutations that cause learning and memory defects in Drosophila melanogaster have been found to also compromise visual responsiveness and attention. A better understanding of attention-like defects in such Drosophila mutants therefore requires a more detailed characterization of visual responsiveness across a range of visual parameters. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We designed an automated behavioral paradigm for efficiently dissecting visual responsiveness in Drosophila. Populations of flies walk through multiplexed serial choice mazes while being exposed to moving visuals displayed on computer monitors, and infra-red fly counters at the end of each maze automatically score the responsiveness of a strain. To test our new design, we performed a detailed comparison between wild-type flies and a learning and memory mutant, dunce (1). We first confirmed that the learning mutant dunce (1) displays increased responsiveness to a black/green moving grating compared to wild type in this new design. We then extended this result to explore responses to a wide range of psychophysical parameters for moving gratings (e.g., luminosity, contrast, spatial frequency, velocity) as well as to a different stimulus, moving dots. Finally, we combined these visuals (gratings versus dots) in competition to investigate how dunce (1) and wild-type flies respond to more complex and conflicting motion effects. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We found that dunce (1) responds more strongly than wild type to high contrast and highly structured motion. This effect was found for simple gratings, dots, and combinations of both stimuli presented in competition. Public Library of Science 2011-06-29 /pmc/articles/PMC3126824/ /pubmed/21738736 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021619 Text en Evans et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Evans, Oliver
Paulk, Angelique C.
van Swinderen, Bruno
An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title_full An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title_fullStr An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title_full_unstemmed An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title_short An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics
title_sort automated paradigm for drosophila visual psychophysics
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126824/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21738736
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021619
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