Affiliation:
1. Department of Biology, Georgetown University
2. Department of Biological Sciences and Neuroscience & Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta
3. Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, Georgetown University
Abstract
Learning and memory storage is a complex process that has proven challenging to tackle. It is likely that, in nature, the instructive value of reinforcing experiences is acquired rather than innate. The association between seemingly neutral stimuli increases the gamut of possibilities to create meaningful associations and the predictive power of moment-by-moment experiences. Here, we report physiological and behavioral evidence of olfactory unimodal sensory preconditioning in fruit flies. We show that the presentation of a pair of odors (S1 and S2) before one of them (S1) is associated with electric shocks elicits a conditional response not only to the trained odor (S1) but to the odor previously paired with it (S2). This occurs even if the S2 odor was never presented in contiguity with the aversive stimulus. In addition, we show that inhibition of the small G protein Rac1, a known forgetting regulator, facilitates the association between S1/S2 odors. These results indicate that flies can infer value to olfactory stimuli based on the previous associative structure between odors, and that inhibition of Rac1 lengthens the time window of the olfactory ‘sensory buffer’, allowing the establishment of associations between odors presented in sequence.
Funder
National Institute of Mental Health
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation
National Institute on Aging
Georgetown University
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subject
General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience
Cited by
3 articles.
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