Evidence for the effect of brief exposure to food, but not learning interference, on maze solving in desert ants.
binary-tree maze
desert ants
forgetting
memory
motivation
Journal
Integrative zoology
ISSN: 1749-4877
Titre abrégé: Integr Zool
Pays: Australia
ID NLM: 101492420
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Sep 2022
Sep 2022
Historique:
pubmed:
28
12
2021
medline:
21
9
2022
entrez:
27
12
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Theories of forgetting highlight 2 active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by reciprocal disruption of memories. According to "proactive interference," information learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new information, whereas "retroactive interference" suggests that newly gathered information interferes with already existing information. Our goal was to examine the possible effect of both mechanisms in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger, which does not use pheromone recruitment, when learning spatial information while searching for food in a maze. Our experiment indicated that neither proactive nor retroactive interference took place in this system although this awaits confirmation with individual-level learning assays. Rather, the ants' persistence or readiness to search for food grew with successive runs in the maze. Elevated persistence led to more ant workers arriving at the food when retested a day later, even if the maze was shifted between runs. We support this finding in a second experiment, where ant workers reached the food reward at the maze end in higher numbers after encountering food in the maze entry compared to a treatment, in which food was present only at the maze end. This result suggests that spatial learning and search persistence are 2 parallel behavioral mechanisms, both assisting foraging ants. We suggest that their relative contribution should depend on habitat complexity.
Identifiants
pubmed: 34958517
doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12622
doi:
Substances chimiques
Pheromones
0
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
704-714Subventions
Organisme : German Research Foundation
ID : FO 298/31-1
Informations de copyright
© 2021 International Society of Zoological Sciences, Institute of Zoology/Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
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