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Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae

A restrained honey bee can be trained to extend its proboscis in response to the pairing of an odor with a sucrose reward, a form of olfactory associative learning referred to as the proboscis extension response (PER). Although the ability of flying honey bees to respond to visual cues is well-estab...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Dobrin, Scott E., Fahrbach, Susan E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368934/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22701575
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037666
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author Dobrin, Scott E.
Fahrbach, Susan E.
author_facet Dobrin, Scott E.
Fahrbach, Susan E.
author_sort Dobrin, Scott E.
collection PubMed
description A restrained honey bee can be trained to extend its proboscis in response to the pairing of an odor with a sucrose reward, a form of olfactory associative learning referred to as the proboscis extension response (PER). Although the ability of flying honey bees to respond to visual cues is well-established, associative visual learning in restrained honey bees has been challenging to demonstrate. Those few groups that have documented vision-based PER have reported that removing the antennae prior to training is a prerequisite for learning. Here we report, for a simple visual learning task, the first successful performance by restrained honey bees with intact antennae. Honey bee foragers were trained on a differential visual association task by pairing the presentation of a blue light with a sucrose reward and leaving the presentation of a green light unrewarded. A negative correlation was found between age of foragers and their performance in the visual PER task. Using the adaptations to the traditional PER task outlined here, future studies can exploit pharmacological and physiological techniques to explore the neural circuit basis of visual learning in the honey bee.
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spelling pubmed-33689342012-06-13 Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae Dobrin, Scott E. Fahrbach, Susan E. PLoS One Research Article A restrained honey bee can be trained to extend its proboscis in response to the pairing of an odor with a sucrose reward, a form of olfactory associative learning referred to as the proboscis extension response (PER). Although the ability of flying honey bees to respond to visual cues is well-established, associative visual learning in restrained honey bees has been challenging to demonstrate. Those few groups that have documented vision-based PER have reported that removing the antennae prior to training is a prerequisite for learning. Here we report, for a simple visual learning task, the first successful performance by restrained honey bees with intact antennae. Honey bee foragers were trained on a differential visual association task by pairing the presentation of a blue light with a sucrose reward and leaving the presentation of a green light unrewarded. A negative correlation was found between age of foragers and their performance in the visual PER task. Using the adaptations to the traditional PER task outlined here, future studies can exploit pharmacological and physiological techniques to explore the neural circuit basis of visual learning in the honey bee. Public Library of Science 2012-06-06 /pmc/articles/PMC3368934/ /pubmed/22701575 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037666 Text en Dobrin, Fahrbach. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Dobrin, Scott E.
Fahrbach, Susan E.
Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title_full Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title_fullStr Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title_full_unstemmed Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title_short Visual Associative Learning in Restrained Honey Bees with Intact Antennae
title_sort visual associative learning in restrained honey bees with intact antennae
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368934/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22701575
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037666
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