Abstract
Evading or escaping from predators is one of the most crucial issues for survival across the animal king-dom.The timely detection of predators and the initiation of appropriate fight-or-flight responses are innate capabili-ties 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 func-tional aspects of the neural circuits involved in this process,including visual threat processing and identification,the selection of appropriate behavioral responses,and the ini-tiation 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.
基金项目
National Natural Science Foundation of China(31871052)
万方数据