Spontaneous alternation: A potential gateway to spatial working memory in Drosophila

- Drosophila show alternating patterns of search in a classic rodent exploration paradigm, the Y-maze.
- Drosophila have facilities for novelty seeking resembling those used by mammals.
- Drosophila can be used to infer basic principles underlying spatial navigation and memory.

Despite their ubiquity in biomedical research, Drosophila have yet to be widely employed as model organisms in psychology. Many complex human-like behaviors are observed in Drosophila, which exhibit elaborate displays of inter-male aggression and female courtship, self-medication with alcohol in response to stress, and even cultural transmission of social information. Here, we asked whether Drosophila can demonstrate behavioral indices of spatial working memory in a Y-maze, a classic test of memory function and novelty-seeking in rodents. Our data show that Drosophila, like rodents, alternate their visits among the three arms of a Y-maze and spontaneously favor entry into arms they have explored less recently versus ones they have just seen. These findings suggest that Drosophila possess some of the information-seeking and working memory facilities mammals depend on to navigate through space and might be relevant models for understanding human psychological phenomena such as curiosity.