Abstract
Many ants establish foraging routes through learning views of the visual panorama. Route models have focused primarily on attractive view use, which experienced foragers orient towards to return to known sites. However, aversive views have recently been uncovered as a key component of route learning. Here, Cataglyphis velox rapidly learned aversive views, when associated with a negative outcome, a period of captivity in vegetation, triggering increases in hesitation behavior. These memories were based on the accumulation of experiences over multiple trips with each new experience regulating forager hesitancy. Foragers were also sensitive to captivity time differences, suggesting they possess some mechanism to quantify duration. Finally, we analyzed foragers' perception of risky (i.e. variable) versus stable aversive outcomes by associating two sites along the route with distinct captivity schedules, a fixed or variable duration, with the same mean across training. Foragers exhibited fewer hesitations in response to risky outcomes compared to fixed ones, indicating they perceived risky outcomes as less severe. Results align with a logarithmic relationship between captivity duration and hesitations, suggesting that aversive stimulus perception is a logarithm of its actual value. We discuss how aversive view learning could be executed within the mushroom bodies circuitry following a prediction error rule.
Highlights
Many ants establish foraging routes through learning views of the visual panorama
There was no significant difference between hesitation numbers during the last training trip, Trip 10 and Test 1 (T = 0.24; p = 1.00) as well as between Test 2 and Test 3 ZV (p = 0.87). These results suggest foragers exhibit evidence of aversive view learning after four prior experiences and these hesitations increased throughout training, peaking at Test 1 (μ ± S.E. = 13.8 ± 2.9)
Evidence of aversive view memory retention persisted for two trips after the aversive outcome was removed (Test 2 and Test 3 ZV) before hesitations returned to baseline (Test 4 and Test 5; Fig. 3)
Summary
Many ants establish foraging routes through learning views of the visual panorama. Route models have focused primarily on attractive view use, which experienced foragers orient towards to return to known sites. Cataglyphis velox rapidly learned aversive views, when associated with a negative outcome, a period of captivity in vegetation, triggering increases in hesitation behavior. These memories were based on the accumulation of experiences over multiple trips with each new experience regulating forager hesitancy. Recent work has expanded this modelling to include the learning of views that are repellent or aversive and cause foragers to turn away from views not associated with the current goal, resulting in orientation away from incorrect directions[27,28] Interactions between these learned attractive and aversive views permit navigators to compare a single current view to their view memories to quickly decide whether to move toward or turn away from a given direction[27,28]. Animals’ choices between risky (variable) and fixed outcomes should be predicted not by the arithmetic mean of these options but instead by their geometric means
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
