CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Fruit flies found to “think” before they act  Thu May 22, 2014 10:29 pm | |
| Fruit flies “think” before they act, a study suggests.
In experiments in which the insects had to tell apart ever more similar concentrations of an odor, researchers found that the flies don’t act instinctively or impulsively, but seem to accumulate information before acting. That has been considered a sign of higher intelligence.
“Fruit flies have a surprising mental capacity,” said University of Oxford neuroscientist Gero Miesenböck, in whose laboratory the new research was performed. “Freedom of action from automatic impulses is considered a hallmark of cognition or intelligence.”
The researchers also found that a gene called FoxP, active in a small set of brain cells, facilitates the choosing.
“Before a decision is made, brain circuits collect information like a bucket collects water. Once the accumulated information has risen to a certain level, the decision is triggered. When FoxP is defective, either the flow of information into the bucket is reduced to a trickle, or the bucket has sprung a leak,” said Oxford’s Shamik DasGupta, the lead author of the study.
The researchers watched Drosophila fruit flies choose between two concentrations of an odor presented to them from opposite ends of a narrow chamber, having been trained to avoid one concentration. When the concentrations were very different and easy to tell apart, the flies usually decided quickly and went to the correct end of the chamber. When the concentrations were very close and hard to tell apart, the flies took much longer to decide and made more mistakes.
The researchers found that mathematical models developed to describe the mechanisms of decision making in humans and primates also matched the fruit fly behavior. And flies with mutations in the FoxP gene were particularly indecisive. The researchers tracked down the gene’s activity to a small cluster of around 200 neurons, or brain cells, out of the 200,000 in the fruit fly brain, implicating these neurons in the evidence-gathering process.
The team reports its findings in the journal Science.
Fruit flies have one FoxP gene, while humans have four related FoxP genes. Human FoxP1 and FoxP2 have previously been associated with language and cognitive development. The genes have also been linked to the ability to learn fine movement sequences, such as playing the piano.
“We don’t know why this gene pops up in such diverse mental processes as language, decision-making and motor learning,” said Miesenböck. But “one feature common to all of these processes is that they unfold over time.”
“FoxP is not a ‘language gene,’ a ‘decision-making gene,’” or any more specific category, he added. “What FoxP does give us is a tool to understand the brain circuits involved in these processes. It has already led us to a site in the brain that is important in decision-making.”
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/140522_decision.htm
|
|
