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

MARTÍN KLAPPENBACH; FERNANDO LOCATELLI

Congreso; XXXIV Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2019

In the wild,animals face diverse situations containing both aversive and appetitive traitsand are able to extract information from them. How this information is storedand retrieved is an important question in neurobiology and honeybees representa great model to answer it, since there are well characterized paradigms tostudy appetitive and aversive memories in a separate manner. In the appetitiveversion, an odor is associated with sucrose and trained animals extend theirproboscis after the sole exposure to the conditioned odor. In the aversiveversion, odor is presented with either salty or bitter solution and this timethe withdrawal of the proboscis is observed in response to the odor. In thepresent study we performed a series of experiments aimed at evaluating to whichextent these two forms of learning interact when appetitive and aversivestimuli take part in the same training protocol. We found that animals are infact able to recognize the conditioned odor in a binary mixture. Additionally,bees can associate two different odors with opposite stimuli when undergone adifferential conditioning protocol. Finally, bees trained with this type ofconditioning were challenged in a test session in which the appetitive and theaversive odors were combined in a mixture. We found that honey bees can expressthe appetitive or the aversive memory depending on their motivational state.