A multi-input optic glomerulus mediates opposing behavioral responses to visual objects

Abstract

Prey, predators or conspecifics are first detected as visual objects in many seeing animals. Vision guides behavioral actions towards or away from these objects. An error in this visual perception could prove fatal. How object information is untangled to avoid errors remains unclear. Here we show that LC10d visual projection neurons in Drosophila melanogaster mediate avoidance of visual objects in the absence of a chemosensory profile. LC10d neurons are broadly tuned to objects and project to the same retinorecipient brain region that receives inputs from LC10a neurons, which are required for tracking. The descending neurons DNa10 are directly downstream of the anterior-facing LC10d sub-population and mediate LC10d-dependent avoidance. Our work demonstrates the use of two similar neuron types and chunking of the visual field into zones as strategies to disentangle similar sets of visual cues requiring nearly opposite behavioral responses.