Associative and non-associative plasticity improves perception of the relevant components in an odor mixture

LOCATELLI FERNANDO

Huerta Grande

Congreso; 2nd Meeting of the Latin American Association of Chemical Ecology (ALAEQ2); 2012

ALAEQ

Animals live immersed in a world of countless stimuli. To deal with the excess of information they have systems that process sensory afference and optimize detection of relevant information. In the present work we ask how this detection is optimized when the classification ?relevant or irrelevant? is not fixed but depends on the experience of each individual. Is sensory processing adjusted in a dynamic way that helps distinguishing the relevant information from the noise in which it can be embedded? The olfactory system of insects provides a good model for this study. Olfactory stimuli in nature are normally complex mixtures, in which irrelevant components may hide the presence of relevant ones. We performed calcium imaging in the antennal lobe of honey bees (the first processing center for olfactory information) and measured the neural representation of mixtures and pure components after associative and non-associative learning. We found that the relative weight of the components in the neural representation of the mixture depends on the previous experience of the animals with the components. Interestingly, the changes in the perception of the mixture do not seem to be consequence of reduced or enhanced detection of the components but on the competitive interactions when present in a mixture. The results are consistent with a model in which the antennal lobe acts to filter olfactory information according to its relevance for performing a particular task.