Honey bees can store and retrieve independent memory traces after complex experiences that combine appetitive and aversive associations

KLAPPENBACH, MARTÍN; LARA, AGUSTIN; LOCATELLI FERNANDO

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY

COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS LTD

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2022

0022-0949

Real-world experiences do often mix appetitive and aversive events. Understanding the ability of animals to extract, store and use this informationis an important issue in neurobiology. We used honey bees as model organism tostudy learning and memory after a differential conditioning that combines appetitiveand aversive training trials. First of all, we describe an aversiveconditioning paradigm that constitutes a clear opposite of the well knownappetitive olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response. Aneutral odour is presented paired with the bitter substance quinine. Aversivememory is evidenced later as an odour-specific impairment in appetitiveconditioning. Then we tested the effect of mixing appetitive and aversiveconditioning trials distributed along the same training session. Differentialconditioning protocols like this were used before to study the ability todiscriminate odours, however they were not focused on whether appetitive andaversive memories are formed. We found that after a differential conditioning,honey bees establish independent appetitive and aversive memories that do notinterfere with each other during acquisition or storage. Finally, we moved thequestion forward to retrieval and memory expression to evaluate what happenswhen appetitive and the aversive learned odours are mixed during test.Interestingly, opposite memories compete in a way that they do not cancel eachother out. Honey bees showed the ability to switch from expressing appetitiveto aversive memory depending on their satiation level.