Multiple mechanisms mediate the suppression of motion vision during escape maneuvers in flying Drosophila

During voluntary behaviors, animals need to disable any reflexes that could interfere with the intended movements. With the optomotor response, flies stabilize a straight flight path by correcting for unintended deviations sensed as the panoramic motion of the surround. HS cells of the fly are thought to mediate optomotor responses to horizontal motion. During spontaneous flight turns, an efference copy acts on HS cells with the right sign to counteract the visual input elicited by the fly’s own behavior. Here, we investigated, whether looming-elicited turns in flying Drosophila have a similar effect on HS cells. We show that looming stimuli themselves can influence the processing of panoramic motion stimuli in HS cells and that an inhibitory efference copy suppresses excitatory motion responses during turns in both directions, but only in a subset of HS cells. Our findings support the notion that the processing of sensory information is finely tuned to behavioral context.