TY - JOUR TI - Computations underlying Drosophila photo-taxis, odor-taxis, and multi-sensory integration AU - Gepner, Ruben AU - Mihovilovic Skanata, Mirna AU - Bernat, Natalie M AU - Kaplow, Margarita AU - Gershow, Marc A2 - Calabrese, Ronald L VL - 4 PY - 2015 DA - 2015/05/06 SP - e06229 C1 - eLife 2015;4:e06229 DO - 10.7554/eLife.06229 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06229 AB - To better understand how organisms make decisions on the basis of temporally varying multi-sensory input, we identified computations made by Drosophila larvae responding to visual and optogenetically induced fictive olfactory stimuli. We modeled the larva's navigational decision to initiate turns as the output of a Linear-Nonlinear-Poisson cascade. We used reverse-correlation to fit parameters to this model; the parameterized model predicted larvae's responses to novel stimulus patterns. For multi-modal inputs, we found that larvae linearly combine olfactory and visual signals upstream of the decision to turn. We verified this prediction by measuring larvae's responses to coordinated changes in odor and light. We studied other navigational decisions and found that larvae integrated odor and light according to the same rule in all cases. These results suggest that photo-taxis and odor-taxis are mediated by a shared computational pathway. KW - olfaction KW - vision KW - multi-sensory integration KW - optogenetics KW - reverse-correlation JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -