Fruit flies can learn non-elemental olfactory discriminations |
| |
Authors: | Matthias Durrieu Antoine Wystrach Patrick Arrufat Martin Giurfa Guillaume Isabel |
| |
Affiliation: | 1.Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Centre for Integrative Biology, CNRS, University of Toulouse, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse, France;2.College of Animal Science (College of Bee Science), Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China;3.Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France |
| |
Abstract: | Associative learning allows animals to establish links between stimuli based on their concomitance. In the case of Pavlovian conditioning, a single stimulus A (the conditional stimulus, CS) is reinforced unambiguously with an unconditional stimulus (US) eliciting an innate response. This conditioning constitutes an ‘elemental’ association to elicit a learnt response from A+ without US presentation after learning. However, associative learning may involve a ‘complex’ CS composed of several components. In that case, the compound may predict a different outcome than the components taken separately, leading to ambiguity and requiring the animal to perform so-called non-elemental discrimination. Here, we focus on such a non-elemental task, the negative patterning (NP) problem, and provide the first evidence of NP solving in Drosophila. We show that Drosophila learn to discriminate a simple component (A or B) associated with electric shocks (+) from an odour mixture composed either partly (called ‘feature-negative discrimination’ A+ versus AB−) or entirely (called ‘NP’ A+B+ versus AB−) of the shock-associated components. Furthermore, we show that conditioning repetition results in a transition from an elemental to a configural representation of the mixture required to solve the NP task, highlighting the cognitive flexibility of Drosophila. |
| |
Keywords: | negative patterning feature-negative discrimination associative learning Pavlovian conditioning insect Drosophila melanogaster |
|
|