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Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees

The results of behavioural experiments provide important information about the structure and information-processing abilities of the visual system. Nevertheless, if we want to infer from behavioural data how the visual system operates, it is important to know how different learning protocols affect...

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Autores principales: Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A., Trillo, Alejandro, Corcobado, Guadalupe
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741178/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23951186
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071551
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author Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A.
Trillo, Alejandro
Corcobado, Guadalupe
author_facet Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A.
Trillo, Alejandro
Corcobado, Guadalupe
author_sort Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A.
collection PubMed
description The results of behavioural experiments provide important information about the structure and information-processing abilities of the visual system. Nevertheless, if we want to infer from behavioural data how the visual system operates, it is important to know how different learning protocols affect performance and to devise protocols that minimise noise in the response of experimental subjects. The purpose of this work was to investigate how reinforcement schedule and individual variability affect the learning process in a colour discrimination task. Free-flying bumblebees were trained to discriminate between two perceptually similar colours. The target colour was associated with sucrose solution, and the distractor could be associated with water or quinine solution throughout the experiment, or with one substance during the first half of the experiment and the other during the second half. Both acquisition and final performance of the discrimination task (measured as proportion of correct choices) were determined by the choice of reinforcer during the first half of the experiment: regardless of whether bees were trained with water or quinine during the second half of the experiment, bees trained with quinine during the first half learned the task faster and performed better during the whole experiment. Our results confirm that the choice of stimuli used during training affects the rate at which colour discrimination tasks are acquired and show that early contact with a strongly aversive stimulus can be sufficient to maintain high levels of attention during several hours. On the other hand, bees which took more time to decide on which flower to alight were more likely to make correct choices than bees which made fast decisions. This result supports the existence of a trade-off between foraging speed and accuracy, and highlights the importance of measuring choice latencies during behavioural experiments focusing on cognitive abilities.
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spelling pubmed-37411782013-08-15 Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A. Trillo, Alejandro Corcobado, Guadalupe PLoS One Research Article The results of behavioural experiments provide important information about the structure and information-processing abilities of the visual system. Nevertheless, if we want to infer from behavioural data how the visual system operates, it is important to know how different learning protocols affect performance and to devise protocols that minimise noise in the response of experimental subjects. The purpose of this work was to investigate how reinforcement schedule and individual variability affect the learning process in a colour discrimination task. Free-flying bumblebees were trained to discriminate between two perceptually similar colours. The target colour was associated with sucrose solution, and the distractor could be associated with water or quinine solution throughout the experiment, or with one substance during the first half of the experiment and the other during the second half. Both acquisition and final performance of the discrimination task (measured as proportion of correct choices) were determined by the choice of reinforcer during the first half of the experiment: regardless of whether bees were trained with water or quinine during the second half of the experiment, bees trained with quinine during the first half learned the task faster and performed better during the whole experiment. Our results confirm that the choice of stimuli used during training affects the rate at which colour discrimination tasks are acquired and show that early contact with a strongly aversive stimulus can be sufficient to maintain high levels of attention during several hours. On the other hand, bees which took more time to decide on which flower to alight were more likely to make correct choices than bees which made fast decisions. This result supports the existence of a trade-off between foraging speed and accuracy, and highlights the importance of measuring choice latencies during behavioural experiments focusing on cognitive abilities. Public Library of Science 2013-08-12 /pmc/articles/PMC3741178/ /pubmed/23951186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071551 Text en © 2013 Rodríguez-Gironés et al 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
Rodríguez-Gironés, Miguel A.
Trillo, Alejandro
Corcobado, Guadalupe
Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title_full Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title_fullStr Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title_full_unstemmed Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title_short Long Term Effects of Aversive Reinforcement on Colour Discrimination Learning in Free-Flying Bumblebees
title_sort long term effects of aversive reinforcement on colour discrimination learning in free-flying bumblebees
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741178/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23951186
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071551
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