RESUMEN
Vision provides animals with detailed information about their surroundings, conveying diverse features such as color, form, and movement across the visual scene. Computing these parallel spatial features requires a large and diverse network of neurons, such that in animals as distant as flies and humans, visual regions comprise half the brain's volume. These visual brain regions often reveal remarkable structure-function relationships, with neurons organized along spatial maps with shapes that directly relate to their roles in visual processing. To unravel the stunning diversity of a complex visual system, a careful mapping of the neural architecture matched to tools for targeted exploration of that circuitry is essential. Here, we report a new connectome of the right optic lobe from a male Drosophila central nervous system FIB-SEM volume and a comprehensive inventory of the fly's visual neurons. We developed a computational framework to quantify the anatomy of visual neurons, establishing a basis for interpreting how their shapes relate to spatial vision. By integrating this analysis with connectivity information, neurotransmitter identity, and expert curation, we classified the ~53,000 neurons into 727 types, about half of which are systematically described and named for the first time. Finally, we share an extensive collection of split-GAL4 lines matched to our neuron type catalog. Together, this comprehensive set of tools and data unlock new possibilities for systematic investigations of vision in Drosophila, a foundation for a deeper understanding of sensory processing.
RESUMEN
To pursue a more mechanistic understanding of the neural control of behavior, many neuroethologists study animal behavior in controlled laboratory environments. One popular approach is to measure the movements of restrained animals while presenting controlled sensory stimulation. This approach is especially powerful when applied to genetic model organisms, such as Drosophila melanogaster, where modern genetic tools enable unprecedented access to the nervous system for activity monitoring or targeted manipulation. While there is a long history of measuring the behavior of body- and head-fixed insects walking on an air-supported ball, the methods typically require complex setups with many custom components. Here we present a compact, simplified setup for these experiments that achieves high-performance at low cost. The simplified setup integrates existing hardware and software solutions with new component designs. We replaced expensive optomechanical and custom machined components with off-the-shelf and 3D-printed parts, and built the system around a low-cost camera that achieves 180 Hz imaging and an inexpensive tablet computer to present view-angle-corrected stimuli updated through a local network. We quantify the performance of the integrated system and characterize the visually guided behavior of flies in response to a range of visual stimuli. In this paper, we thoroughly document the improved system; the accompanying repository incorporates CAD files, parts lists, source code, and detailed instructions. We detail a complete ~$300 system, including a cold-anesthesia tethering stage, that is ideal for hands-on teaching laboratories. This represents a nearly 50-fold cost reduction as compared to a typical system used in research laboratories, yet is fully featured and yields excellent performance. We report the current state of this system, which started with a 1-day teaching lab for which we built seven parallel setups and continues toward a setup in our lab for larger-scale analysis of visual-motor behavior in flies. Because of the simplicity, compactness, and low cost of this system, we believe that high-performance measurements of tethered insect behavior should now be widely accessible and suitable for integration into many systems. This access enables broad opportunities for comparative work across labs, species, and behavioral paradigms.
RESUMEN
Field Dependence-Independence (FDI) is a widely studied dimension of cognitive styles designed to measure an individual's ability to identify embedded parts of an organized visual field as entities separate from that given field. The research aims to determine whether the brain activity features that are considered to be perceptual switching indicators could serve as robust features, differentiating Field-Dependent (FD) from Field-Independent (FI) participants. Previous research suggests that various features derived from event related potentials (ERP) and frequency features are associated with the perceptual reversal occurring during the observation of a bistable image. In this study, we combined these features in the context of a different experimental scheme using ambiguous and unambiguous stimuli during participants' perceptual observations. We assessed the participants' FD-I classification with the use of the Hidden Figures Test (HFT). Results show that the peak amplitude of the frontoparietal positivity, the late positive deflection in frontal and parietal areas, is higher for the FD group at specific locations of the left lobe, whereas it occurs later for the FD group at the central and occipital electrodes. Additionally, the FD group exhibits higher levels of gamma power before stimulus onset at channel TP10 and higher gamma power during reversal at the right centroparietal electrodes (T8, CP6, and TP10). The peak amplitude of the reversal positivity, the positive deflection during the reversal, is higher for the FD group at the rear right lobe (P4).
RESUMEN
"Dira" is a novel experimental paradigm to record combinations of behavioral and metacognitive measures for the creative process. This task allows assessing chronological and chronometric aspects of the creative process directly and without a detour through creative products or proxy phenomena. In a study with 124 participants we show that (a) people spend more time attending to selected vs. rejected potential solutions, (b) there is a clear connection between behavioral patterns and self-reported measures, (c) the reported intensity of Eureka experiences is a function of interaction time with potential solutions, and (d) experiences of emerging solutions can happen immediately after engaging with a problem, before participants explore all potential solutions. The conducted study exemplifies how "Dira" can be used as an instrument to narrow down the moment when solutions emerge. We conclude that the "Dira" experiment is paving the way to study the process, as opposed to the product, of creative problem solving.
