Idiosyncratic learning performance in flies

Smith, Matthew A-Y; Honegger, Kyle; Turner, Glenn; Bivort, Benjamin de

doi:10.1098/rsbl.2021.0424

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(61 reference statements)

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“…Each fly first experienced the two odors (3-octanol; OCT and 4-methylcyclohexanol; MCH) unrewarded for a block of 60 trials, and then reward delivery was activated for the following block of 60 trials. As observed previously, although individual flies exhibited different odor biases in this naive phase(75, 76, 85), those biases averaged out over the population (Fig. 1B + inset).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

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Reward expectations direct learning and drive operant matching inDrosophila

Rajagopalan

Darshan

Fitzgerald

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Foraging animals must use decision-making strategies that dynamically account for uncertainty in the world. To cope with this uncertainty, animals have developed strikingly convergent strategies that use information about multiple past choices and reward to learn representations of the current state of the world. However, the underlying learning rules that drive the required learning have remained unclear. Here, working in the relatively simple nervous system of Drosophila, we combine behavioral measurements, mathematical modeling, and neural circuit perturbations to show that dynamic foraging depends on a learning rule incorporating reward expectation. Using a novel olfactory dynamic foraging task, we characterize the behavioral strategies used by individual flies when faced with unpredictable rewards and show, for the first time, that they perform operant matching. We build on past theoretical work and demonstrate that this strategy requires the existence of a covariance-based learning rule in the mushroom body - a hub for learning in the fly. In particular, the behavioral consequences of optogenetic perturbation experiments suggest that this learning rule incorporates reward expectation. Our results identify a key element of the algorithm underlying dynamic foraging in flies and suggest a comprehensive mechanism that could be fundamental to these behaviors across species.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…However, most existing tasks rely on studying the place preference behavior of groups of flies. This limits the ability of the experimenter to provide reward contingent on actions of any one fly, making it hard to study behavior in response to probabilistic reward or measure choice distributions over time (but see [51][52][53][54][55] ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reward expectations direct learning and drive operant matching inDrosophila

Rajagopalan

Darshan

Fitzgerald

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Studies on bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) and fruit ies (Drosophila melanogaster) have also demonstrated a positive association between the 1st and 2nd phase of a reversal learning problem within a single modality (bumble bees, visual learning: Raine and Chittka 2012; fruit ies, olfactory learning: Smith et al 2022). We now extend this conclusion to honey bees tested in two sensory modalities with either Pavlovian or operant conditioning.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees: Cognitive specialization within sensory and reinforcement modalities

Finke

Scheiner

Giurfa

et al. 2022

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The question of whether individuals perform consistently across a variety of cognitive tasks is relevant for studies of comparative cognition. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is an appropriate model to study cognitive consistency as its learning can be studied in multiple elemental and non-elemental learning tasks. We took advantage of this possibility and studied if the ability of honey bees to learn a simple discrimination correlates with their ability to solve two tasks of higher complexity, reversal learning and negative patterning. We performed four experiments in which we varied the sensory modality of the stimuli (visual or olfactory) and the type (Pavlovian or operant) and complexity (elemental or non-elemental) of conditioning to examine if stable correlated performances could be observed across experiments. Across all experiments, the individual’s proficiency to learn the simple discrimination task was positively correlated with the performance in both reversal learning and negative patterning, while the performances in reversal learning and negative patterning were not correlated. These results suggest that this pattern of correlated and independent performances across the learning paradigms tested represent a distinct cognitive characteristic of bees. Further research is necessary to examine if this pattern of individual cognitive consistency can be found in other insect species as a common characteristic of insect brains.

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“…There is substantial knowledge about consistent individual differences in behavioural traits [Réale et al, 2007], including clonal animals like Amazon mollies [Schuett et al, 2011, Freund et al, 2013, Bierbach et al, 2017]. However, learning as an individual trait has only recently been shown in great detail in the fruit fly D. melanogaster [Smith et al, 2022]. Here, we show that this individuality in learning can also be found in a naturally-occurring clonal vertebrate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Experienced social partners hinder learning performance in naive clonal fish

Francisco

Lukas²,

Stöcker

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Social learning can facilitate information spread within groups and is generally assumed to increase learning efficiency in animals. Here, we asked how individual learning is affected by skill level of a demonstrator present during learning. We predicted that both task-naive and task-experienced individuals benefit from a task-experienced, conspecific demonstrator. We used the all-female clonal Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa) for our experiments. We further propose a model framework which lets us directly relate each research question to a single model parameter. First, following a classical conditioning paradigm over five days, half the fish were trained to find food inside a cylinder, while the others were provided with food randomly dispersed in their tank. As a result trained individuals visited the cylinder with a higher likelihood than randomly fed individuals and showed consistent individual differences in their learning performance. In a second step, we allowed these fish to observe a conspecific while we continued (for those trained) or started (for naives) individual training. We found that trained individuals did not benefit from a partner, regardless of the partners' proficiency, but showed higher average performances compared to naives. Naive individuals showed a decrease in learning performance when paired with experienced partners but not when paired with other naive ones. Our results suggest that Amazon mollies learn a foraging task individually and differ consistently in their individual learning ability. Further, social learning depends on own, as well as the demonstrator's skill level in a way that observing informed conspecifics may hamper own learning.

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Idiosyncratic learning performance in flies

Cited by 17 publications

References 58 publications

Reward expectations direct learning and drive operant matching inDrosophila

Reward expectations direct learning and drive operant matching inDrosophila

Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees: Cognitive specialization within sensory and reinforcement modalities

Experienced social partners hinder learning performance in naive clonal fish

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