How do flies (and humans) detect temporal patterns?

All animals need to make predictions about what will happen next, and this is only possible if there is a clear pattern in the environment. Consistent with this, humans have a persistent belief that a random sequence will display a pattern, and this is reflected in both their behaviour as well as electrophysiology signals (EEG), in a phenomenon known in the literature as sequential effects. Such effects are pervasive across many different tasks in humans, but have not been studied in detail in other species. We investigated sequential effects in local field potentials (LFPs) recorded from the central brain of Drosophila melanogaster and found clear similarities between the way flies and humans make predictions in a random environment. Our results point to universal mechanisms in the way different brains make predictions about the future.

Short Bios

Dinis Gökaydin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland. He is interested in how brains detect patterns and make predictions. He holds a PhD in Psychology and an MSc in Mathematics.

Bruno van Swinderen is a Group Leader at the Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland. His lab studies selective attention, sleep, and general anaesthesia in Drosophila melanogaster. He did a PhD in evolution and population genetics and is interested using simple animal models to understand the mechanistic underpinnings of consciousness.

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