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Abstract
Affective states influence decision-making under ambiguity in humans and other animals. Individuals in a negative state tend to interpret ambiguous cues more negatively than individuals in a positive state. We demonstrate that the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, also exhibits state-dependent changes in cue interpretation. Drosophila were trained on a Go/Go task to approach a positive (P) odour associated with a sugar reward and actively avoid a negative (N) odour associated with shock. Trained flies were then either shaken to induce a purported negative state or left undisturbed (control), and given a choice between: air or P; air or N; air or ambiguous odour (1 : 1 blend of P : N). Shaken flies were significantly less likely to approach the ambiguous odour than control flies. This ‘judgement bias’ may be mediated by changes in neural activity that reflect evolutionarily primitive affective states. We cannot say whether such states are consciously experienced, but use of this model organism's versatile experimental tool kit may facilitate elucidation of their neural and genetic basis.
Highlights
Animal affective (emotional) states can be operationally defined as ‘states elicited by rewards and punishers’ where rewards are stimuli that animals work to acquire and punishers are stimuli that they work to avoid [1]
Animal affective states can be operationally defined as ‘states elicited by rewards and punishers’ where rewards are stimuli that animals work to acquire and punishers are stimuli that they work to avoid [1]. This behaviourally grounded definition allows systematic study of animal affect despite lack of knowledge about whether such states, which we assume to be instantiated in neural activity, are consciously experienced
Gibson et al [5] argue that such characteristics can be observed in spontaneous responses of Drosophila to a repeated threatening visual cue
Summary
Animal affective (emotional) states can be operationally defined as ‘states elicited by rewards and punishers’ where rewards are stimuli that animals work to acquire and punishers are stimuli that they work to avoid [1]. Flies learnt to avoid an odour (negative; N) associated with shock and approach an odour ( positive; P) associated with a sucrose reward.
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