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Early Olfactory, But Not Gustatory Processing, Is Affected By The Selection Of Heritable Cognitive Phenotypes In Honey Bee, Meghan M. Bennett, Chelsea N. Cook, Brian H. Smith, Hong Lei

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

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 …