Honey bees form separate memory traces after experiences containing appetitive and aversive consequences

MARTÍN KLAPPENBACH; FERNANDO LOCATELLI

San Diego

Congreso; Society for Neuroscience; 2018

In natural situations animals must be able to acquire information from experiences that combine appetitive and aversive consequences. How learning derived from those experiences is stored and retrieved to produce adaptive behavior is a major question in neurobiology. Honey bees have been lengthily used to study olfactory learning and memory processes triggered upon olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response. In its appetitive version, the odor is presented with sugar solution and the bees learn to extend the proboscis in response to the odor. In the aversive version, the odor is presented with a salty or a bitter solution, and the behavior observed is the withdrawal of the proboscis in response to the odor. In the present study we initiated a series of experiments aimed at evaluating in which extend these two forms of learning interact when appetitive and aversive stimuli are intrinsic parts of the same training protocol