Functional Organization of Appetitive Learning and Memory in a Generalist Pollinator, the Honey Bee

Individual experience with environmental stimuli leaves multiple traces of neuronal plasticities in the nervous system. Receptors adapt to prolonged stimulation; neural circuits habituate to repeated stimuli and dishabituate or sensitize to arousing stimuli; and new functional connections are formed or existing ones abolished by associative and latent learning. What are the rules of neural plasticity and how do they relate to the biological constraints under which they have evolved? The neuroethological approach taken in the study of honey bee learning and memory tries to understand the neuronal mechanisms of the multiple memory traces as adaptations to the particular demands of foraging by a generalist pollinating insect. The study of the functional dynamics of memory thus serves two goals: to unravel the informational sources which guide the sequences and time dependencies of the animal’s choice behavior, and to better understand the neural correlates of the various forms of memory.

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