Topic: navigational behavior

The navigational behavior of many animals relies on internal representations of space. These representations are often encoded in a world-centric (allocentric) reference frame. To use these representations to guide behavior, animals must transform them to a body-centric (egocentric) reference frame. We took advantage of the experimental tractability of Drosophila melanogaster to determine how neurons in its brain perform this computation. In the fly brain, directions are encoded as vectors in an allocentric reference frame by neurons in a region called the central complex. We investigated whet