Sensory adaptation and its effect on detection of minor components in odor mixtures

LOCATELLI, F; GASCUE, F.; PÍREZ, N.

Villasimius

Simposio; 15th European Symposium for Insect Taste and Olfaction; 2017

ESITO

Animals process and perceive environmental information in flexible ways. Some changes in perception are sustained and involve learning and memory processes while others occur quickly and are only transient. In this framework, sensory adaptation is defined as the phenomenon by which the sensitivity to a stimulus decreases after a sustained exposure to it. This phenomenon is characterized by a rapid loss of sensitivity and full recovery within a few seconds after the stimulus disappears. Curiously, this phenomenon has been mostly described and studied by focusing on what the animal fails to perceive, but not on the consequences that it has on the perception of stimuli for which the animal has not experienced adaptation. In this project we study the enriching effect that sensory adaptation has on the ability of animals to detect stimuli to which it has not been adapted and that would remain overshadowed by dominant stimuli under normal conditions. We use honey bees Apis mellífera that have a high capacity to learn and recognize odors. By doing behavioral experiments we show that this phenomenon reduces appetitive learning of adapted stimuli while it favors learning of minor components that would normally stay occluded. By doing calcium imaging experiments, we determined that activation patterns that encode mixtures in the antennal lobe are drastically altered after sensory adaptation, in a way that favors the representation of stimuli that are present at sub-threshold concentrations. The results obtained so far emphasize that sensory adaptation is a fundamental mechanism to increase the sensitivity of the animal and not to reduce it.