‘In an August study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Yale researchers showed that fruit flies, like humans, can be fooled into seeing motion in an image where there is none, such as the rotating snake illusion, well-known to neuroscientists and psychologists. Moreover, by tracking and manipulating neurons in visual processing areas of the flies’ brains while they were looking at the illusion, they were able to determine that the illusion results from small imbalances in the contributions of different types of motion-detecting neurons.

It’s possible that the same neural mechanism may be at work when humans and other species see illusory motion, too, according to lead author Damon Clark, a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University.

“The last common ancestor of flies and humans lived a half-billion years ago, but the two species have evolved similar strategies for perceiving motion,” Clark said. “Understanding these shared strategies can help us more fully understand the human visual system.”’ Read more