Animals socially interact during foraging and share information about the quality and location of food sources. The mechanisms of social information transfer during foraging have been mostly studied at the behavioral level, and its underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. Fruit flies have become a model for studying the neural bases of social information transfer, because they provide a large genetic toolbox to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity, and they show a rich repertoire of social behaviors. Fruit flies aggregate, they use social information for choosing a suitable mating partner and oviposition site, and they show better aversive learning when in groups. However, the effects of social interactions on associative odor-food learning have not yet been investigated. Here, we present an automated learning and memory assay for walking flies that allows the study of the effect of group size on social interactions and on the formation and expression of associative odor-food memories. We found that both inter-fly attraction and the duration of odor-food memory expression increase with group size. This study opens up opportunities to investigate how social interactions during foraging are relayed in the neural circuitry of learning and memory expression.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/jeb.207241 | DOI Listing |
J Exp Biol
October 2019
Department of Biology, Neurobiology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz 78457, Germany
Animals socially interact during foraging and share information about the quality and location of food sources. The mechanisms of social information transfer during foraging have been mostly studied at the behavioral level, and its underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. Fruit flies have become a model for studying the neural bases of social information transfer, because they provide a large genetic toolbox to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity, and they show a rich repertoire of social behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLearn Mem
April 2019
Department of Genetics, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, 39118 Magdeburg, Germany.
Animals of many species are capable of "small data" learning, that is, of learning without repetition. Here we introduce larval as a relatively simple study case for such one-trial learning. Using odor-food associative conditioning, we first show that a sugar that is both sweet and nutritious (fructose) and sugars that are only sweet (arabinose) or only nutritious (sorbitol) all support appetitive one-trial learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Biol
December 2013
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB1 3EJ, UK; International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme, Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme/Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, 1400-038 Lisbon, Portugal. Electronic address:
In desert locusts, increased population densities drive phenotypic transformation from the solitarious to the gregarious phase within a generation [1-4]. Here we show that when presented with odor-food associations, the two extreme phases differ in aversive but not appetitive associative learning, with solitarious locusts showing a conditioned aversion more quickly than gregarious locusts. The acquisition of new learned aversions was blocked entirely in acutely crowded solitarious (transiens) locusts, whereas appetitive learning and prior learned associations were unaffected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurobiol Learn Mem
February 2013
Departament de Psicobiologia i Metodologia de les Ciències de la Salut, Institut de Neurociències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
It is well established that D-cycloserine (DCS), a partial agonist of the NMDA receptor glycine site, enhances learning and memory processes. Although the effects of DCS have been especially elucidated in the extinction and reconsolidation of aversive behavioral paradigms or drug-related behaviors, they have not been clearly determined in appetitive tasks using natural reinforcers. The current study examined the effects of pre-retrieval intra-basolateral amygdala (BLA) infusions of DCS on the extinction and reconsolidation of an appetitive odor discrimination task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLearn Mem
November 2008
Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
We utilized olfactory-mediated chemotaxis in Caenorhabditis elegans to examine the effect of aging on information processing and animal behavior. Wild-type (N2) young adults (day 4) initially approach and eventually avoid a point source of benzaldehyde. Aged adult animals (day 7) showed a stronger initial approach and a delayed avoidance to benzaldehyde compared with young adults.
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