How to Measure Attention Span of a Fly

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2010) —
An Australian-German team of scientists at Freie Universität and the
Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia, has found a way to
measure the attention span of a fly. The findings could lead to further
advances in the understanding of attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD) and autism in humans.

Associate Professor Bruno van Swinderen at the Queensland Brain
Institute in Brisbane and Dr. Björn Brembs at Freie Universität combined
genetic techniques with brain recordings and behavioral testing. They
found different mutations that either increase or decrease a fly's
attention span.
Using the genetic fruit fly model, Drosophila melanogaster,
van Swinderen found that a fly's level of distractibility is finely
tuned to allow "normal" behavioral responses to a constantly changing
environment. He said, "We now have the two ends of an attention spectrum
in our model. We have a fly memory mutant that is hard to distract and
another fly memory mutant that's too distractible. They both have the
same result -- they don't learn well but for completely different
reasons, not unlike human patients afflicted with autism and ADHD."
The fruit flies were fed methylphenidate, which is sold under the
brand name Ritalin and is used to treat patients with ADHD. The
researchers found the drug had similar effects on fruit flies as it did
on people: it helped the distractible flies to pay attention to visual
stimuli.
"It suggests there may be similar pathways in the brains of fruit
flies and humans, which means we now have a simple reductionist model,
with all the genetic tools that go along with it, to try to understand
what exactly this drug is doing," according to van Swinderen.
Heisenberg fellow Brembs agrees: "These surprising parallels between
insects and humans may point to a general, common functional
organization of brains."
The research is reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.