Behavioral Responses to a Repetitive Visual Threat Stimulus Express a Persistent State of Defensive Arousal in Drosophila

摘要: The neural circuit mechanisms underlying emotion states remain poorly understood. Drosophila offers powerful genetic approaches for dissecting function, but whether flies exhibit emotion-like behaviors has not been clear. We recently proposed that model organisms may express internal displaying “emotion primitives,” which are general characteristics common to different emotions, rather than specific anthropomorphic emotions such as “fear” or “anxiety.” These primitives include scalability, persistence, valence, and generalization multiple contexts. Here, we have applied this approach determine flies’ defensive responses moving overhead translational stimuli (“shadows”) purely reflexive states. describe a new behavioral assay in confined an enclosed arena repeatedly exposed stimulus. Repetitive promoted graded (scalable) persistent increases locomotor velocity hopping, occasional freezing. stimulus also dispersed feeding from food resource, suggesting both negative valence context generalization. Strikingly, there was significant delay before the returned following stimulus-induced dispersal, suggestive of slowly decaying state. length increased when more were delivered initial dispersal. can be mathematically modeled by assuming state behaves leaky integrator exposure. Our results suggest repetitive visual threat exhibiting canonical primitives, possibly analogous fear mammals. mechanistic basis now investigated genetically tractable insect species.