When part of an animal’s sensory organs is damaged, the be havior that is controlled by the sensory system can change. However, animal behavior can be compensationally recovered as the nervous system reconstructs itself using information from the remaining sensory organs. Such compensatory re covery of the nervous system and developmental behavior is observed in many animals, including humans. However, little research has been conducted into the mechanism of compen sational recovery. In this paper, we review a cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus) model for compensatory recovery of escape behavior in response to air-puff stimulation. After unilateral removal of the cercus, the direction of escape behavior in re sponse to an air-puff becomes abnormal. If the crickets are allowed to walk freely after sensory ablation, compensational recovery of escape direction occurred about 2 weeks. This result suggests that the airflow over the remaining cercus during spontaneous walking is used to realize the defect in the nervous system and compensate escape behavior.

Although how the brain processes sensory information to produce adaptive behavior has been extensively investigated, it is still far from fully understanding what is actually occur ring in sensory pathways in natural condition. This is partly because such sensory processing is performed while animals are moving, and the way the movement modulates sensory processing is highly intricate. In the last decade, neural activ ities in rodent sensory cortices have been measured during movement and indeed, dynamic and complex processing has been elucidated. Interestingly, such sophisticated computa tion has been found even in a tiny insect brain. In this re view, based on my findings in the visual processing of a walking fly, I would like to introduce several recent re searches especially investigating how animal’s locomotion modulates sensory processing and following behavior.