---
res:
  bibo_abstract:
  - "Locomotion is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom because an animal's survival depends
    on its ability to navigate its environment to find food, avoid predators and locate
    potential mates. These behaviours require control mechanisms that can extract
    information from the environment, particularly visual cues. Selective evolutionary
    pressures have thus refined such visuomotor transformations in a species-specific
    manner to meet the specific ecological and ethological challenges of each organism.
    However, a common challenge across organisms as visual information processing\r\nbecomes
    increasingly detailed is the mechanisms required to synthesise disparate pieces
    of information into a coherent percept or unified picture of the world. In this
    thesis, I investigate how disparate visual information is combined in the brain
    of Drosophila melanogaster to effectively guide locomotion.\r\nFor this, I first
    designed and built a behavioural setup to record locomotion and present visual
    stimuli to freely-walking fruit flies in a closed-loop manner. This setup allowed
    the investigation of innate visually-guided behaviours, including the optomotor
    reflex and courtship.\r\nSecond, taking advantage of my system I investigated
    the optomotor response, a reflexive visual stabilisation behaviour in which flies
    turn in the direction of global motion to minimise retinal slip. This behaviour
    is thought to be mediated by Lobula plate tangential cells (LPTCs); a complex
    network of optic-flow-sensitive neurons essential for self-motion estimation.
    Using a novel genetic mutant, I demonstrate that electrical coupling between two
    LPTC subtypes, contralateral HS and H2 neurons, regulates the balance between
    smooth optomotor turning and saccadic anti-optomotor responses. These findings
    underscore the critical role of binocular motion cue integration in guiding course
    control. Finally, I developed a novel behavioural paradigm in which a sexually
    aroused male fruit fly is presented with an optomotor distractor. This setup creates
    competition between two visual behaviours, courtship tracking and the  optomotor
    response, enabling me to explore how the visual system resolves this conflict.
    In this setting, males\r\nengaged in courtship selectively suppress their optomotor
    response based on the female's location. Furthermore, when this experiment is
    replicated with an “artificial female”, optogenetically aroused males alternate
    between tracking and optomotor responses. The probability and dynamics of this
    switching are determined by the relative strengths of the two competing stimuli.
    In summary, the results presented in this thesis explore two mechanisms – integration
    and competition - through which visual information is combined in the brain of
    the fruit fly to drive locomotion.@eng"
  bibo_authorlist:
  - foaf_Person:
      foaf_givenName: Roshan K
      foaf_name: Satapathy, Roshan K
      foaf_surname: Satapathy
      foaf_workInfoHomepage: http://www.librecat.org/personId=46046B7A-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
    orcid: 0009-0006-2974-5075
  bibo_doi: 10.15479/at:ista:18568
  dct_date: 2024^xs_gYear
  dct_isPartOf:
  - http://id.crossref.org/issn/2663-337X
  - http://id.crossref.org/issn/978-3-99078-047-3
  dct_language: eng
  dct_publisher: Institute of Science and Technology Austria@
  dct_title: Mechanisms of visual integration and competition in innate behaviours
    in Drosophila melanogaster@
...