Flies maintain idiosyncratic learning proficiency across odor-discrimination tasks.

Abstract

Although insects of a same species appear similar when seen through human eyes, they exhibit considerable differences in behavioral performances, including learning success in conditioning tasks. New work on olfactory conditioning in fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster shows that these insects vary in their idiosyncratic learning proficiency and that this proficiency is consistent across days and variants of the trained task, thus uncovering the existence of different learning profiles within groups of flies.