Perception of relevant components in odor mixtures depends on experience

AGUSTIN LARA; FERNANDO LOCATELLI; MILAGROS AZCUETA; MARACHLIAN EMILIANO

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXXII CONGRESO ANUAL SAN 2017; 2017

Sociedad Argentina de Invsetigaciones en Neurocienccias

Perception of relevant components inodor mixtures depends on experience Agustin Lara1,Fernando Locatelli1,2, Maria de los Milagros Azcueta1,Emiliano Marachlian1,2,31-Departamentode Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas yNaturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2Instituto de Fisiología,Biología Molecular y Neurociencias, UBA-CONICET, Argentina. 3-Departamento deFísica, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires,Argentina.In nature, olfactory stimuli arepresent as mixtures in which their elements differ in their meaning. Thismeaning may even change among individuals from the same species but withdifferent experiences. We studied honey bees, as they are generalist foragersthat depend on olfaction and on their own experience to find food sources. In previous works we studied theneural representation of mixtures and pure components and found that therepresentation of a mixtures is shifted toward the representation of the learnedcomponents and away from components that have no predictive value.Here we asked if these changes dohave a correlate at the  behaviorallevel. In a first experiment we trainedbees using appetitive conditioning toward pure odors and after that we testedthem using mixtures that contain that odor. We found that bees are highlyefficient in detecting the rewarded component embedded in the mixture. In a second experiment we trainedthe bees using pure odors, and then, we retrained them again but using asconditioned stimulus a mixture that contains the learned odor plus a novelodor. Finally, the bees were tested with the novel odor alone. A second groupof bees underwent only the learning session with the mixture. We found thatlearning the novel odor was affected in animals that had a previous experience.These result are consistent with the hypothesis that odor and mixtureperception is adjusted by experience.