Early olfactory, but not gustatory processing, is affected by the selection of heritable cognitive phenotypes in honey b
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Early olfactory, but not gustatory processing, is affected by the selection of heritable cognitive phenotypes in honey bee Meghan M. Bennett1,3 · Chelsea N. Cook2,3 · Brian H. Smith3 · Hong Lei3 Received: 22 July 2020 / Revised: 11 October 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Associative learning enables animals to predict rewards or punishments by their associations with predictive stimuli, while non-associative learning occurs without reinforcement. The latter includes latent inhibition (LI), whereby animals learn to ignore an inconsequential ‘familiar’ stimulus. Individual honey bees display heritable differences in expression of LI. We examined the behavioral and neuronal responses between honey bee genetic lines exhibiting high and low LI. We observed, as in previous studies, that high LI lines learned a familiar odor more slowly than low LI bees. By measuring gustatory responses to sucrose, we determined that perception of sucrose reward was similar between both lines, thereby not contributing to the LI phenotype. We then used extracellular electrophysiology to determine differences in neural responses of the antennal lobe (AL) to familiar and novel odors between the lines. Low LI bees responded significantly more strongly to both familiar and novel odors than the high LI bees, but the lines showed equivalent differences in response to the novel and familiar odors. This work suggests that some effects of genotype are present in early olfactory processing, and those effects could complement how LI is manifested at later stages of processing in brains of bees in the different lines. Keywords Latent inhibition · Apis mellifera · Antennal lobe · Proboscis extension reflex (PER) · Extracellular recording
Introduction Understanding the link between genetics and learning is crucial for uncovering the sources of individual variation in behavior. The interactions between genetics, stimulus integration and expression of behavior are complex. Learning behaviorally relevant stimuli is important as animals can then utilize their environment more effectively. In particular, learning to pay less attention to irrelevant stimuli, known as latent inhibition (LI) (Lubow and Moore 1959; Lubow 1973), is also an important form of plasticity. LI occurs when familiarization to a repeated, unreinforced stimulus reduces subsequent learning of the familiar stimulus. One theoretical interpretation of LI proposes that it could be due * Hong Lei [email protected] 1
Present Address: Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, USDAARS, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA
2
Present Address: Department of Biological Sciences, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53233, USA
3
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
to loss of attention to familiar, unimportant stimuli. Alternatively, acquisition could occur normally, but that association is poorly expressed in behavior [reviewed in (Pearce and Bouton 2001)]. In either interpretation, expre
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