A heuristic underlies the search for relief in Drosophila melanogaster

Humans rely on multiple types of sensory information to make decisions, and strategies that shorten decision-making time by taking into account fewer but essential elements of information are preferred to strategies that require complex analyses. Such shortcuts to decision making are known as heuristics. The identification of heuristic principles in species phylogenetically distant to humans would shed light on the evolutionary origin of speed-accuracy trade-offs and offer the possibility for investigating the brain representations of such trade-offs, urgency and uncertainty. By performing experiments on spatial learning in the invertebrate Drosophila melanogaster, we show that the fly's search strategies conform to a spatial heuristic-the nearest neighbor rule-to avoid bitter taste (a negative stimulation). That is, Drosophila visits a salient location closest to its current position to stop the negative stimulation; only if this strategy proves unsuccessful does the fly use other learned associations to avoid bitter taste. Characterizing a heuristic in D. melanogaster supports the view that invertebrates can, when making choices, operate on economic principles, as well as the conclusion that heuristic decision making dates to at least 600 million years ago.