On May 9th, the Journal of Neuroscience published an article from ION entitled “Experience improves feature extraction in Drosophila”. This work was done by graduate students Yueqing Peng, Wang Xi and colleagues under the supervision of Prof. Aike Guo.

Modification of ongoing and future behaviors based on prior experience demonstrates so called “intelligence” in animals and even human being. The current study showed that prior experience can enhance visual feature extraction in Drosophila. Visual feature extraction is the ability to select the key component from multiple visual features, such as shape and color. Using a visual flight simulator, Peng and colleagues found that, following conditioning with a visual feature of objects among combinatorial shape-color features, wild type flies exhibited poor ability to extract the correct visual feature. However, the ability for visual feature extraction was greatly enhanced in the flies previously trained with that visual feature alone. Finally, they also found that mushroom body, one of the central brain structures in Drosophila, is required for this experience-dependent feature extraction.

These findings indicate that the Drosophila brain can use prior experience to improve certain visual cognitive abilities. Furthermore, the study of neural mechanisms underlying experience-dependent visual processes in Drosophila may contribute to our understanding of high-level cognitive behaviors in general.