Abstract: Visual cognition, as one of the fundamental aspects of neurobiology, is the way to explore “How does the brain function as a whole?”“How matter becomes imagination?” Drosophila, as a model organism, shares certain features of visual cognition in common with mammals at the genetic, molecular, cellular, and even higher behavioral levels. Thus the fly brain therefore could provide a useful vehicle for exploring the neural mechanisms underlying visual cognition from a genesbrainbehavior perspective. Here, we consider mainly the higher cognitive behaviors based on learning and memory, such as visual pattern recognition, context generalization, visual  saliencebased decision, and attentionlike behavior. It seems that even fruit fly with very small brain can behave in a surprisingly rational manner under a broad range of conditions. This seems to argue against the concept that in order to behave rationally humans would have needed to evolve some unique facility. We hope that our focus on these aspects of Neuroscience  will shed light on our understanding the “brainmind” relationship.

Key words: Drosophila, visual invariant perception, visual memory trace, saliencybased decision, visual feature extraction, crossmodal interaction