Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, USDA-ARS, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA.
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2021 Jan;207(1):17-26. doi: 10.1007/s00359-020-01451-5. Epub 2020 Nov 17.
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.
联想学习使动物能够通过与预测性刺激的关联来预测奖励或惩罚，而非联想学习则在没有强化的情况下发生。后者包括潜伏抑制（LI），即动物学会忽略无关紧要的“熟悉”刺激。个体蜜蜂在 LI 表达上表现出可遗传的差异。我们研究了表现出高和低 LI 的蜜蜂遗传系之间的行为和神经元反应。我们观察到，与以前的研究一样，高 LI 系比低 LI 蜜蜂学习熟悉气味的速度更慢。通过测量对蔗糖的味觉反应，我们确定两条线对蔗糖奖励的感知相似，因此不会导致 LI 表型。然后，我们使用细胞外电生理学来确定两条线对熟悉和新气味的触角叶（AL）的神经反应差异。低 LI 蜜蜂对熟悉和新气味的反应明显强于高 LI 蜜蜂，但两条线对新和熟悉气味的反应差异相同。这项工作表明，基因型的某些影响存在于早期嗅觉处理中，并且这些影响可以补充不同系蜜蜂大脑中 LI 在处理后期的表现方式。
