LONDON: New study shows that fruit flies make conscious decisions and share similar cognitive processes to humans.We have all been there.Sitting in the kitchen trying to waft away a fruit fly as it buzzes mindlessly around your head.
But according to a new study, the mindless flight paths of the fruit fly, might not be quite as mindless as first thought.
Research carried out at the University of Oxford has found that – like humans – the fruit fly makes conscious decisions and can spend longer deliberating over the more difficult of them.
The study, which was set up by the University of Oxford’s Centre for Circuits and Behaviour, was aimed at finding out about the cognitive processes in small insects in order to see whether the findings could help us establish a better understand of the human mind.
As part of the experiment, researchers offered the fruit flies a choice between a smell at a dangerous odour level and then one that was a lot weaker.
The flies did well when the safe option was four or five times weaker than the more dangerous smell, but found it a more difficult and took more time when the differences were more acute.
Professor Gero Miesenböck, whose team did the work at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Circuits and Behaviour, said: “This is the clearest evidence yet of a cognitive process running in a very simple brain
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