Fruit flies can learn non-elemental olfactory discriminations

Durrieu, Matthias; Wystrach, Antoine; Arrufat, Patrick; Giurfa, Martín; Isabel, Guillaume

doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.1234

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…A substantial body of literature on brain circuitry and other aspects of neuroscience have historically drawn from studies of invertebrate biology and physiology 42 , while research on cognitive phenomena in invertebrates is gaining interest 8 , 43 . A common framework for the study of emotions across species, including invertebrates, has also been recently proposed 10 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence of anticipatory immune and hormonal responses to predation risk in an echinoderm

Hamel¹,

Jobson

Caulier

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Recent efforts have been devoted to the link between responses to non-physical stressors and immune states in animals, mostly using human and other vertebrate models. Despite evolutionary relevance, comparatively limited work on the appraisal of predation risk and aspects of cognitive ecology and ecoimmunology has been carried out in non-chordate animals. The present study explored the capacity of holothuroid echinoderms to display an immune response to both reactive and anticipatory predatory stressors. Experimental trials and a mix of behavioural, cellular and hormonal markers were used, with a focus on coelomocytes (analogues of mammalian leukocytes), which are the main components of the echinoderm innate immunity. Findings suggest that holothuroids can not only appraise threatening cues (i.e. scent of a predator or alarm signals from injured conspecifics) but prepare themselves immunologically, presumably to cope more efficiently with potential future injuries. The responses share features with recently defined central emotional states and wane after prolonged stress in a manner akin to habituation, which are traits that have rarely been shown in non-vertebrates, and never in echinoderms. Because echinoderms sit alongside chordates in the deuterostome clade, such findings offer unique insights into the adaptive value and evolution of stress responses in animals.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence of anticipatory immune and hormonal responses to predation risk in an echinoderm

Hamel¹,

Jobson

Caulier

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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“…However, while insects have long been considered to be robot-like entities ( 56 – 58 ) at the bottom of a hypothetical cognitive abilities ladder, this view has been robustly challenged. Insects have been shown to learn from each other ( 59 , 60 ), master complex rules and abstract concepts and associations ( 22 , 61 – 65 ), and use tools flexibly ( 30 , 44 ). Our results fit into this body of evidence that insects can rival vertebrates in some cognitive tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ants combine object affordance with latent learning to make efficient foraging decisions

Poissonnier,

Hartmann,

Czaczkes

2023

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The affordance of an object refers to its functional properties. For example, a bowl has the affordance of holding water, but a sieve does not. Here, we report that ants learn the affordance of a novel object without this attribute being rewarded, and use the memory of this affordance to avoid predicted, but never experienced, crowding. Ants were trained to feeders, which could support either only one ant or many. Two feeders were encountered, each of identical design but differently scented. After training, on the outward journey, half the ants encounter nestmates, which had fed on food matching one of the training feeders. Encountering returning nestmates reduced preference for the feeder matching the scent of the encountered nestmates, but only for ants trained on a limited-access feeder; ants trained on an unlimited feeder were unaffected. In other words, only if ants know that the food access is limited, and receive information that this feeder is heavily visited, do they reduce their preference for this feeder. To achieve this, the ants had to combine memories of the feeders’ affordance with the presence of nestmates. Then they had to use semantic knowledge that restricted food access combined with nestmate presence predicts a likelihood of crowding, or a rule such as “if the food is restricted and there are nestmates on the path, go to another food source.” Regardless of the mechanism, these results demonstrate that ants latently learn the affordance of their surroundings, an unexpected cognitive ability for an invertebrate.

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“…Inhibitory feedback onto the calyces of honey bees is needed for solving patterning tasks in which insects have to suppress summation of responses to single elements previously rewarded when they are presented in an unrewarded compound (Devaud et al, 2015) (i.e., animals have to learn to respond to the elements and not to the compound) or for reversal learning (Boitard et al, 2015). A similar conclusion applies to fruit flies as GABAergic input to the MBs provided by APL neurons also mediates the capacity to solve patterning tasks (Durrieu et al, 2020). Increased feedback inhibition at the level of the MBs may therefore appear as a hallmark of certain learning phenomena, which require enhanced neural sparseness to decorrelate stimulus representations and thus memory specificity.…”

Section: Immediate Early Genes Downregulation In the Bee Brainmentioning

confidence: 94%

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

Lafon

Geng

Avarguès‐Weber

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Honey bees are reputed for their remarkable visual learning and navigation capabilities. These capacities can be studied in virtual reality (VR) environments, which allow studying performances of tethered animals in stationary flight or walk under full control of the sensory environment. Here, we used a 2D VR setup in which a tethered bee walking stationary under restrictive closed-loop conditions learned to discriminate vertical rectangles differing in color and reinforcing outcome. Closed-loop conditions restricted stimulus control to lateral displacements. Consistently with prior VR analyses, bees learned to discriminate the trained stimuli. Ex vivo analyses on the brains of learners and non-learners showed that successful learning led to a downregulation of three immediate early genes in the main regions of the visual circuit, the optic lobes (OLs) and the calyces of the mushroom bodies (MBs). While Egr1 was downregulated in the OLs, Hr38 and kakusei were coincidently downregulated in the calyces of the MBs. Our work thus reveals that color discrimination learning induced a neural signature distributed along the sequential pathway of color processing that is consistent with an inhibitory trace. This trace may relate to the motor patterns required to solve the discrimination task, which are different from those underlying pathfinding in 3D VR scenarios allowing for navigation and exploratory learning and which lead to IEG upregulation.

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Fruit flies can learn non-elemental olfactory discriminations

Cited by 8 publications

References 49 publications

Evidence of anticipatory immune and hormonal responses to predation risk in an echinoderm

Evidence of anticipatory immune and hormonal responses to predation risk in an echinoderm

Ants combine object affordance with latent learning to make efficient foraging decisions

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

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