Two different memory traces are formed when honey bees associate odors with appetitive and aversive stimuli

KLAPPENBACH, MARTÍN; LOCATELLI FERNANDO

Cordoba

Congreso; XXXIV Reunión Anual SAN 2019; 2019

Animals must be ableto extract information from situations in which aversive and appetitive consequencesappear intermingled. How this information is stored and retrieved to ensure coherentand adaptive behaviour is an important question in neurobiology. Honey beesrepresent a great model to study this question since there are in this specieswell characterized behavioural paradigms to study appetitive and aversive learningand memory. In the appetitive version, an odor is associated with sucrose andanimals extend the proboscis upon stimulation with the conditioned odor. In theaversive version, odor is presented with a salty or bitter solution and animalswithdrawal the proboscis upon stimulation with the odor. In the present studywe combined these two paradigms in a series of experiments aimed at evaluating inwhich extent the two forms of memories are independently established orinteract when appetitive and aversive stimuli take part of the same trainingprotocol. We found that bees were able to recognize appetitive and aversivelearned odors embedded in complex mixtures. In addition, bees could establishindependent appetitive and aversive memories acquired during the same trainingsession. Finally, when bees were challenged in a test session in which theappetitive and the aversive odors were mixed, they could behave according tothe appetitive or the aversive odor depending on their motivational state.