Fruit flies may be able to teach researchers a thing or two about artificial intelligence.

University of Michigan biologists and their colleagues have uncovered a neural network that enables Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies to convert external stimuli of varying intensities into a “yes or no” decision about when to act.

The research, scheduled to publish Oct. 15 in the journal Current Biology, offers hints into how these decisions work in other species, and could perhaps even be applied to help AI machines learn to categorize information.