Conditioned visual flight orientation in Drosophila: dependence on age, practice, and diet.

Abstract

Introduction

Sub-strains of Drosophila Canton-S differ markedly in their locomotor behavior

“…217101, Greiner Bio-One GmbH, Maybachstr.2, 72636 Frickenhausen) in a controlled density 9 on standard cornmeal/molasses medium 10 at 25°C in a 12 h:12 h dark/light cycle for one generation before being tested. Flies were collected 0–1 day after hatching and put in new food vials for one day.…”

Dissociation of visual associative and motor learning in Drosophila at the flight simulator

“…Mutant dunce 1 flies have the same genetic background as Canton-S flies; behaviour-genetic analyses of the dunce 1 fly have demonstrated that it is defective in olfactory associative learning and short-term memory but essentially normal in other behavioural respects (Dudai et al, 1976;Byers et al, 1981). Flies were maintained on a standard corn meal/molasses medium (Guo et al, 1996) at 25 • C and 60% humidity with a 14-h light:10-h dark photoperiod with light on at 08:00 h. Three-to four-day-old female flies were prepared according to standard procedures as described in earlier works (Heisenberg and Wolf, 1984). No sex-related difference was observed and it did not matter whether the female was virgin or not.…”

“…In the mass training procedure, the negative reinforcer was presented throughout without test interval and the conditioned behaviour of the fly during successive training periods was checked. The standard training procedure was similar to that described in earlier works (Guo et al, 1996;Xia et al, 1997). In the pre-test period (PTE) before training, the IR beam was blocked and the fly's spontaneous preference for the two pattern types was tested; during the training periods (TR1 and TR2), the fly was trained to associate visual patterns with the negative reinforcer (heat punishment); the IR beam was blocked again in the test period (TE) and the memory retention of the fly was tested.…”

“…PI = 1 meant the fly completely avoided the heat punishment, PI = −1 meant the fly was facing the punished patterns all the time, and PI = 0 meant the fly stayed in the HOT and COLD domains with equal probability. In standard training procedure, the PI was also regarded as the preference index in PTE, the avoidance index in TR1 and TR2, or the memory index in TE (Guo et al, 1996).…”

“…It seemed that the training session in standard training procedure could more effectively improve the motor learning performance of Canton-S flies. Actually, the earlier study (Guo et al, 1996) had demonstrated that the standard training procedure and mass training procedure had different effect on the associative learning scores, that learning experiments without any pre-test session leaded to lower learning scores. It is likely that a test fly has to become familiar with the highly artificial environment at the flight simulator for stable flying, that is, to learn how to stabilize the panorama in the closed loop at the flight simulator.…”