Topic: collision avoidance

Visual motion provides us with rich cues about the three-dimensional structure of our environment. However, it is generally unknown how circuits of neurons decode spatial information carried by patterns of visual motion. Here, we study the neural mechanisms of a collision avoidance behavior in walking Drosophila fruit flies as a simple model of motion-based spatial vision. In psychophysical experiments, we observed that flies exhibit slowing upon encountering small objects moving back-to-front in the frontolateral visual field. With a simple simulation, we demonstrate that this slowing can be