Speaker
Description
In nature, insects perceive and consolidate complex multisensory cues to elicit diverse behaviors. Our previous work using a classical conditioning paradigm shows that Drosophila melanogaster benefits from bimodal sensory integration when associating punishment signals with weakly learned olfactory and visual cues on a need-to basis. By adapting our behavioral paradigm to a physiological setup with a two-photon microscope, we performed bimodal aversive conditioning on a living fly while recording calcium-dependent neuronal responses from select populations in higher-order brain centers, such as the mushroom body (MB) and lateral horn (LH). Consistent with our behavioral results, we observed differential modulation in the responses of these neurons to odor and light stimuli after unimodal and bimodal training, revealing a potential multimodal integration site that consolidates contextual information mediated by the LH and associative learning information mediated by the MB. Further experiments inhibiting the functionality of these neurons could clarify their role in bimodal sensory integration and provide insight into the fundamental neuronal mechanisms underlying multisensory processes.
