A multi-input optic glomerulus mediates opposing behavioral responses to visual objects

Summary Prey, predators or conspecifics are first detected as visual objects in seeing animals. Vision guides behavioral actions towards or away from these objects. An error in this visual perception could prove fatal. How object information is untangled to avoid errors remains unclear. Here we show that LC10d visual projection neurons in Drosophila melanogaster mediate avoidance of visual objects devoid of a chemosensory profile. LC10d neurons are broadly tuned to objects and project to same retinorecipient brain region that receives inputs from LC10a neurons, which are required for tracking. The descending neurons DNa10 are directly downstream of the anterior-looking LC10d sub-population and mediate LC10d-dependent avoidance. Our work demonstrates the use of two similar neuron types and chunking of the visual field as strategies to disentangle similar sets of visual cues. Discrete objects are avoided until chemosensory information is gathered to enable decision making on whether to engage in social interactions or rather to avoid them.