While learning to avoid toxic food is common in mammals and occurs in some insects, learning to avoid cues associated with infectious pathogens has received little attention. We demonstrate that Drosophila melanogaster show olfactory learning in response to infection with their virulent intestinal pathogen Pseudomonas entomophila. This pathogen was not aversive to taste when added to food. None...

A growing body of evidence implicates the ventral striatum in using information acquired through associative learning. The present study examined the activity of ventral striatal neurons in awake, behaving rats during go/no-go odor discrimination learning and reversal. Many neurons fired selectively to odor cues predictive of either appetitive (sucrose) or aversive (quinine) outcomes. Few neuro...

Auditory fear conditioning, a model for fear learning, is thought to be mediated by synaptic changes in the cortical and thalamic inputs to the lateral amygdala (LA); however, the specific roles of both pathways are still debated. Here, we report that a CaMKII-alpha-Cre-mediated knock-out (KO) of the rap1a and rap1b genes impaired synaptic plasticity and increased basal synaptic transmission in...

Pavlovian aversive conditioning requires learning of the association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned, aversive stimulus (US) but also involves encoding the time interval between the two stimuli. The neurobiological bases of this time interval learning are unknown. Here, we show that in rats, the dorsal striatum and basal amygdala belong to a common functional network un...

Nicotine, the primary psychoactive component of tobacco smoke, is known to possess potent rewarding and aversive stimulus properties. The mammalian ventral tegmental area (VTA) is involved importantly in the mediation of the motivational effects of nicotine. However, the neural outputs from the VTA that may be involved in the transmission of the rewarding and aversive motivational effects of ni...

To survive in complex environments, animals need to have mechanisms to select effective actions quickly, with minimal computational costs. As perhaps the computationally most parsimonious of these systems, Pavlovian control accomplishes this by hardwiring specific stereotyped responses to certain classes of stimuli. It is well documented that appetitive cues initiate a Pavlovian bias toward vig...

Previous studies have shown that exposing young worker bees (Apis mellifera) to queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) reduces their aversive learning performance, while enhancing their attraction to QMP. As QMP has been found to reduce the rate of juvenile hormone (JH) synthesis in worker bees, we examined whether aversive learning in 2-day old workers exposed to QMP from the time of adult emergence...

There are two prevailing notions regarding the involvement of the corticobasal ganglia system in value-based learning: (i) the direct and indirect pathways of the basal ganglia are crucial for appetitive and aversive learning, respectively, and (ii) the activity of midbrain dopamine neurons represents reward-prediction error. Although (ii) constitutes a critical assumption of (i), it remains el...

Learning from punishment is a powerful means for behavioral adaptation with high relevance for various mechanisms of self-protection. Several studies have explored the contribution of released dopamine (DA) or responses of DA neurons on reward seeking using rewards such as food, water, and sex. Phasic DA signals evoked by rewards or conditioned reward predictors are well documented, as are modu...

Queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) is produced by honey bee queens and used to regulate the behavior and physiology of their nestmates. QMP has recently been shown to block aversive learning in young worker bees, an effect that can be mimicked by treating bees with one of QMP's key components, homovanillyl alcohol (HVA). Although the mechanisms underlying this blockade remain unclear, HVA has bee...