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

Abstract

During voluntary behaviors, animals need to disable any reflexes that could interfere with the intended movements. With the optomotor response, for example, flies stabilize a straight flight path by correcting for unintended deviations sensed as 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 flys own behavior. Here, we investigated HS cell activity during looming-elicited turns in flying Drosophila. We show that looming stimuli themselves can influence the processing of panoramic motion stimuli in HS cells and that in addition, an inhibitory efference copy suppresses excitatory motion responses during turns, but only in a subset of HS cells. In conclusion, our findings support the notion that processing of sensory information is finely tuned to behavioral context.