A study published in Science establishes that fruit flies , insects widely used in research, ponder the decisions they make when faced with a choice that is especially difficult for them, in a way not unlike how we do ourselves. Until now, this same behavior had been detected in primates and other mammals, such as mice.
To verify this, a team of scientists from the Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior at the University of Oxford designed an experiment in which some flies were trained to associate a new aroma of a certain intensity with a feeling of danger.
When the experts gave these animals the possibility to choose between the smell set at that concentration and another similar, but milder, they correctly chose the latter four out of five times . However, if the difference between the two concentrations did not exceed 10%, they spent much more time in an intermediate region, before deciding on one or the other.
“It is the clearest evidence that cognitive processes occur in a brain as simple as that of these animals,” says Professor of Physiology Gero Miesenböck, who coordinated the study.
“In general, people tend to think of insects as small robots that simply respond to signals from the environment,” he said. Scientists believe that this process is related to the activity of fewer than 200 neurons and the FoxP gene. In fact, mutations in the latter are associated in humans with language and cognitive processes.
