Abstract
Appetitive and aversive learning drive an animal toward or away from stimuli predicting reinforcement, respectively. The specificity of these memories may vary due to differences in cost–benefit relationships associated with appetitive and aversive contexts. As a consequence, generalization performances may differ after appetitive and aversive training. Here, we determined whether honey bees show different rates of olfactory generalization following appetitive olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response, or aversive olfactory conditioning of the sting extension response. In both cases, we performed differential conditioning, which improves discrimination learning between a reinforced odor (CS+) and a non-reinforced odor (CS−) and evaluated generalization to two novel odors whose similarity to the CS+ and the CS− was different. We show, given the same level of discriminatory performance, that rates of generalization are similar between the two conditioning protocols and discuss the possible causes for this phenomenon.
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Acknowledgments
M.G. acknowledges the support of the French Research Council, the University Paul Sabatier and of the Institut Universitaire de France. NB and PdE were supported by a grant of the Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen and by the Danish National Research Foundation (Centre for Social Evolution). Thanks to the Centre of Excellence in Biological Interactions for allowing allocation of working time and salary (provided by project grant 1251337) on the writing of our manuscript. We thank the three anonymous referees for their help in improving the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Treatment of the experimental animals complied with European laws on animal care and experimentation.
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Martin Giurfa and Patrizia d’Ettorre shared senior authorship.
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10071_2013_671_MOESM1_ESM.jpg
Supplementary material 1 Acquisition curves and test for both appetitive (PER, n = 75) and aversive (SER, n = 99) differential conditioning paradigms. As there was no significant difference in acquisition depending on whether A or B was CS+, data are pooled here. For the test, only the response to CS+ and CS− are shown (JPEG 39 kb)
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Bos, N., Roussel, E., Giurfa, M. et al. Appetitive and aversive olfactory learning induce similar generalization rates in the honey bee. Anim Cogn 17, 399–406 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0671-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0671-6