Conditioning: Simple Neural Circuits in the Honeybee

In honeybee olfactory learning, the pathways for the conditioned stimulus (CS, odor) and the unconditioned stimulus (US, sucrose) are well defined. The US pathway is implemented in a single identified neuron, the VUMmx1 neuron. The olfactory pathway (the CS pathway) consists of the olfactory receptor neurons projecting through the antennal nerve to the antennal lobe (AL); the first-order integration neuropil; the olfactory projection neurons (PNs), which connect the AL with the mushroom body (MB); the lateral horn (also called lateral protocerebrum); and other higher-order brain regions. CS and US pathways converge anatomically at three sites: the AL, the lip region of the MB, and the lateral horn. For two of these regions, the AL and the MB, it has been shown with local injections of the putative transmitter of the first ventral unpaired median neuron of the maxillary segment (VUMmx1) as a substitute for the reward stimulus that olfactory memory induces learning by forward pairing (but not by backward pairing). These findings corroborate earlier observations using local cooling as a retrograde amnestic treatment, which documented a cooling-sensitive memory phase for the AL during the first 1–2min after a single learning trial and such a phase for the MB for the first 5–6min. The early and late short-term-memory phases after single-trial olfactory conditioning were related to the AL and MB, respectively, on the basis of such findings.

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