Perception of relevant components in odor mixtures depends on experience

MARIA DE LOS MILAGROS AZCUETA; AGUSTIN LARA; EMILIANO MARACHLIAN; FERNANDO LOCATELLI

Congreso; Encuento Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2017

In nature, olfactorystimuli are present as mixtures in which their elements differ in theirmeaning. This meaning may even change among individuals from the same speciesbut with different experiences. We studied honey bees, as they are generalistforagers that depend on olfaction and on their own experience to find foodsources. In previous works westudied the neural representation of mixtures and pure components and found thatthe representation of a mixtures is shifted toward the representation of thelearned components and away from components that have no predictive value.Here we asked if thesechanges do have a correlate at the behavioral level. In a first experimentwe trained bees using appetitive conditioning toward pure odors and after thatwe tested them using mixtures that contain that odor. We found that bees arehighly efficient in detecting the rewarded component embedded in the mixture. In a second experiment we trained the bees using pure odors, and then,we retrained them again but using as conditioned stimulus a mixture thatcontains the learned odor plus a novel odor. Finally, the bees were tested withthe novel odor alone. A second group of bees underwent only the learningsession with the mixture. We found that learning the novel odor was affected inanimals that had a previous experience. These result are consistent with thehypothesis that odor and mixture perception is adjusted by experience.