Mind the Gap: Olfactory Trace Conditioning in Honeybees

Mind the gap: olfactory trace conditioning in honeybees.

Trace conditioning is a form of classical conditioning, where a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) is associated with a following appetitive or aversive stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US). Unlike classical delay conditioning, in trace conditioning there is a stimulus-free gap between CS and US, and thus a poststimulus neural representation (trace) of the CS is required to bridge the...

Olfactory trace conditioning in Drosophila.

The neural representation of a sensory stimulus evolves with time, and animals keep that representation even after stimulus cessation (i.e., a stimulus "trace"). To contrast the memories of an odor and an odor trace, we here establish a rigorous trace conditioning paradigm in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We modify the olfactory associative learning paradigm, in which the odor and ele...

Inhibitory conditioning in honeybees.

Honeybees were rewarded with sucrose solution for choosing AX(a grey target, X, labelled with a distinctive stimulus, A) rather than ABX (a grey target labelled both with A and with another distinctive stimulus, B)-AX+/ABX- training. Tests of independent groups made after such training showed a clear preference not only for AX over ABX, but also for ABX over BX, and for X over BX. These experim...

Aversive Learning in Honeybees Revealed by the Olfactory Conditioning of the Sting Extension Reflex

Invertebrates have contributed greatly to our understanding of associative learning because they allow learning protocols to be combined with experimental access to the nervous system. The honeybee Apis mellifera constitutes a standard model for the study of appetitive learning and memory since it was shown, almost a century ago, that bees learn to associate different sensory cues with a reward...

“Mind the Gap” in Reporting the Outdated Statistics