ABSTRACT
Internal representations enable flexible behavior in both animals and artificial agents. Here, we propose a conceptual framework for how Drosophila use their internal representation of head direction to maintain and modify preferred headings upon selective thermal reinforcement. We show that flies in a well-established operant visual learning paradigm use stochastically generated fixations and directed saccades to express heading preferences, and that silencing their head direction representation compromises their ability to modify these preferences based on reinforcement. We describe how flies’ ability to quickly adapt their behavior to the rules of their environment may rest on a behavioral policy whose parameters are flexible but whose form and dependence on the head-direction representation are genetically encoded in the structure of their circuits. Many of the mechanisms we outline may be broadly relevant for rapidly adaptive behavior driven by internal representations.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
This updated version of our manuscript includes additional data from experiments in which we silenced the compass neurons and analyzed the impact of this perturbation on the fly's visual learning behavior. These experiments were performed by RK, who is now a co-author of the manuscript. This version of the manuscript also features an updated model and additional simulations.
