"...the brain spontaneously breaks down decisions among multiple options to a series of two-choice decisions until only one option -- the one ultimately selected -- remains. This was found to result in animals exhibiting a series of abrupt changes in direction, each associated with the exclusion of one of the remaining options....

The team used immersive virtual reality to test their theoretical predictions in flying, walking, and swimming animals -- the fruit fly, desert locust, and zebrafish, respectively.... All species were found to exhibit exactly the same bifurcations as had been predicted....

'It is often thought that animals first decide where to go and then they move to the target,' says Sridhar. 'But our findings show that the interplay between movement and the changing neural representation of options considerably impacts how decisions are made. What is so exciting about these findings is that this response yields extremely effective decision-making in complex and diverse ecological contexts.'"