INVESTIGADORES
LOCATELLI Fernando Federico
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Associative and non-associative plasticity improves perception of the relevant components in an odor mixture
Autor/es:
LOCATELLI FERNANDO
Lugar:
Huerta Grande
Reunión:
Congreso; 2nd Meeting of the Latin American Association of Chemical Ecology (ALAEQ2); 2012
Institución organizadora:
ALAEQ
Resumen:
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.