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About the Authors:
Rich Pang
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliations Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2644-6110
Floris van Breugel
Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing - review & editing
Affiliations Division of Biology and Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States of America, Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
Michael Dickinson
Roles Data curation, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Division of Biology and Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States of America
Jeffrey A. Riffell
Roles Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
Adrienne Fairhall
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Supervision, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of AmericaAbstract
Natural decision-making often involves extended decision sequences in response to variable stimuli with complex structure. As an example, many animals follow odor plumes to locate food sources or mates, but turbulence breaks up the advected odor signal into intermittent filaments and puffs. This scenario provides an opportunity to ask how animals use sparse, instantaneous, and stochastic signal encounters to generate goal-oriented behavioral sequences. Here we examined the trajectories of flying fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) navigating in controlled plumes of attractive odorants. While it is known that mean odor-triggered flight responses are dominated by upwind turns, individual responses are highly variable. We asked whether deviations from mean responses depended on specific features of odor encounters, and found that odor-triggered turns were slightly but significantly modulated by two features of odor encounters. First, encounters with higher concentrations triggered stronger upwind turns. Second, encounters occurring later in a sequence triggered weaker upwind turns. To contextualize the latter history dependence theoretically, we examined trajectories simulated from three normative tracking strategies. We found that neither a purely reactive strategy nor a strategy in which the tracker learned the plume centerline over time captured...