Dragonflies Smarter Than We Thought

Researchers in Australia have found evidence that the dragonfly is capable of higher-level thought processes when hunting its prey.

AsianScientist (Dec. 24, 2012) – Researchers in Australia have found evidence that the dragonfly is capable of higher-level thought processes when hunting its prey.

The discovery, published this month in the journal Current Biology, is the first evidence that an invertebrate animal has brain cells for selective attention, which has so far only been demonstrated in primates.

Dr. Steven Wiederman and Associate Professor David O’Carroll from the University of Adelaide’s Center for Neuroscience Research have been studying insect vision for many years.

Using a tiny glass probe with a tip that is only 60 nanometers wide – 1,500 times smaller than the width of a human hair – the researchers discovered that neuron activity in the dragonfly’s brain enables this selective attention.

They found that when presented with more than one visual target, the dragonfly brain cell ‘locks on’ to one target and behaves as if the other targets don’t exist.

“Selective attention is fundamental to humans’ ability to select and respond to one sensory stimulus in the presence of distractions,” said Wiederman, the lead author on the study.

“Imagine a tennis player having to pick out a small ball from the crowd when it’s traveling at almost 200 kilometers an hour – you need selective attention in order to hit that ball back into play. Precisely how this works in biological brains remains poorly understood, and this has been a hot topic in neuroscience in recent years,” he said.

Wiederman explained that when the dragonfly hunts for its prey, it filters out all other potential prey once it has selected a target. The dragonfly then swoops in on its prey with an accuracy rate of 97 percent.

O’Carroll says this brain activity makes the dragonfly a more efficient and effective predator.

“What’s exciting for us is that this is the first direct demonstration of something akin to selective attention in humans shown at the single neuron level in an invertebrate,” said O’Carroll, the senior author on the study.

“Recent studies reveal similar mechanisms at work in the primate brain, but you might expect it there. We weren’t expecting to find something so sophisticated in lowly insects from a group that’s been around for 325 million years,” he said.

Because the insect brain is simple and accessible, future work may allow researchers to fully understand the underlying network of neurons and copy it into intelligent robots, O’Carroll said.

The article can be found at: Wiederman SD et al. (2012) Selective Attention in an Insect Visual Neuron.

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Source: University of Adelaide; Photo: Tang Yew Chung/Asian Scientist Magazine.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

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