Reinstatement in honeybees is context-dependent.

Area of Science:

• Animal Behavior
• Neuroscience
• Insect Cognition

Background:

• Extinction learning involves the decrease of a conditioned response (CR) when a conditioned stimulus (CS) is no longer paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US).
• Phenomena like reinstatement, spontaneous recovery, and renewal suggest that extinction does not erase the original CS-US association but rather inhibits it.
• Previous research in honeybees demonstrated spontaneous recovery, indicating that the original memory is retained after extinction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether honeybees exhibit reinstatement of conditioned responses after extinction.
• To determine if reinstatement in honeybees is dependent on the experimental context, a known factor in vertebrates.

Main Methods:

• Honeybees (Apis mellifera) were trained to associate a CS with a US.
• Extinction training was conducted, followed by testing for reinstatement under different contextual conditions.
• Contextual changes were manipulated by altering the ambient light color in the experimental setup.

Main Results:

• Reinstatement of the conditioned response (CR) was demonstrated in honeybees after extinction.
• The reinstatement effect was found to be context-dependent.
• A change in the color of the illuminating light was sufficient to signal a contextual change and influence reinstatement.

Conclusions:

• The initially formed CS-US memory in honeybees is not lost during extinction.
• Honeybees appear to learn and utilize contextual cues during extinction.
• Context-dependent reinstatement suggests that honeybees can retrieve specific CS-US memories based on environmental context.