Neural Circuit Mechanisms Involved in Animals’ Detection of and Response to Visual Threats

Abstract Evading or escaping from predators is one of the most crucial issues for survival across the animal kingdom. The timely detection of predators and the initiation of appropriate fight-or-flight responses are innate capabilities of the nervous system. Here we review recent progress in our understanding of innate visually-triggered defensive behaviors and the underlying neural circuit mechanisms, and a comparison among vinegar flies, zebrafish, and mice is included. This overview covers the anatomical and functional aspects of the neural circuits involved in this process, including visual threat processing and identification, the selection of appropriate behavioral responses, and the initiation of these innate defensive behaviors. The emphasis of this review is on the early stages of this pathway, namely, threat identification from complex visual inputs and how behavioral choices are influenced by differences in visual threats. We also briefly cover how the innate defensive response is processed centrally. Based on these summaries, we discuss coding strategies for visual threats and propose a common prototypical pathway for rapid innate defensive responses..

Medienart:

Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2023

Erschienen:

2023

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:39

Enthalten in:

Neuroscience bulletin - 39(2023), 6 vom: 25. Jan., Seite 994-1008

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Wu, Qiwen [VerfasserIn]
Zhang, Yifeng [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext [lizenzpflichtig]

Themen:

Circuit mechanism
Encoding
Escape
Freezing
Innate defensive behavior
Looming

Anmerkungen:

© Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

doi:

10.1007/s12264-023-01021-0

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

OLC2143848668