Dennis Goldschmidt
Felsenberg Lab, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research

Unpublished work in progress, presented at FMI Annual Meeting 2026 on 8 September 2026. The results are on the physical poster — get in touch and I will walk you through them.

A closed-loop virtual reality approach to study context-dependent memory in Drosophila

Poster 90 · FMI Annual Meeting 2026, Basel, Switzerland · Tue 8 Sep, 16:40-17:40

The rig. A tethered fly walks on an air-supported ball, and the panorama around it turns with every step it takes — so it steers through a visual world that never moves it.

What we do

A fly can learn that an odour predicts a targeted infrared laser pulse, then act on that memory in one place and ignore it in another — context selects which memory is retrieved rather than simply cueing it. To put that context under experimental control we rebuilt the setup as a closed-loop virtual reality: a tethered fly walks on a ball and steers through a visual world that turns with it, designed so the same output neurons can be imaged while it moves.

Closed-loop VR in complex environments with changing contexts. 3D rendering of virtual reality with ground color (green/blue) as contextual cues. Each of these two contextual spaces employ different contingency rules, i.e., which odors are punished. We use this setup to ask how contextual changes affect the retrieval of aversive odor memories.

Follow up

Email me about this work

A copy of the poster is available on request. More of my work is on the research and publications pages.

This page: https://degoldschmidt.github.io/poster/