Abstract
Anti-instinctive learning, an ability to modify an animal's innate behaviors in ways that go against one's innate tendency, can confer great evolutionary advantages to animals and enable them to better adapt to the changing environment. Yet, our understanding of anti-instinctive learning and its underlying mechanisms is still limited. In this work, we describe a new anti-instinctive learning behavior of fruit flies. This learning paradigm requires the fruit fly to respond to a recurring, aversive, mild heat stress by modifying its innate locomotion behavior. We found that experiencing movement-triggered mild heat stress repeatedly significantly reduced walking activity in wild type fruit flies, indicating that fruit flies are capable of anti-instinctive learning. We also report that such learning ability is reduced in dopamine 1-like receptor 1 (Dop1R1) null mutant and dopamine 2-like receptor (Dop2R) null mutant flies, suggesting that these two dopamine receptors are involved in mediating anti-instinctive learning in flies.
Highlights
The relationship between innate and learned behaviors has attracted a lot of attention since the mid20th century (Tinbergen, 1951, 1963; Breland and Breland, 1961; Lorenz, 1991)
We report here that this anti-instinctive learning ability is reduced in flies lacking either the dopamine 1-like receptor 1 (Dop1R1) or dopamine 2-like receptors (Dop2R)
The likelihood of receiving mild heat stress during one behavioral state is the fraction of time duration a fly receives mild heat stress when it is at that behavioral state
Summary
The relationship between innate and learned behaviors has attracted a lot of attention since the mid20th century (Tinbergen, 1951, 1963; Breland and Breland, 1961; Lorenz, 1991). The process of an animal associating certain behaviors of its own to a stimulus is operant learning ( called operant conditioning) (Skinner, 1963). A classic operant conditioning example is B.F. Skinners’ experiments on pigeons where a pigeon enclosed in a chamber received food pellets as rewards when it pecked a disc correctly (Ferster and Skinner, 1957). Skinners’ experiments on pigeons where a pigeon enclosed in a chamber received food pellets as rewards when it pecked a disc correctly (Ferster and Skinner, 1957) Based on this definition, the operant learning process modifies an animal’s behavior. It is estimated that most of the operant behaviors studied in laboratory conditions are between the two
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