Article Dans Une Revue Integrative Zoology Année : 2022

Evidence for the effect of brief exposure to food, but not learning interference, on maze solving in desert ants

Tomer Gilad
  • Fonction : Auteur
Arik Dorfman
  • Fonction : Auteur
Aziz Subach
  • Fonction : Auteur
Susanne Foitzik
  • Fonction : Auteur
Inon Scharf
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

Theories of forgetting highlight 2 active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by reciprocal disruption of memories. According to "proactive interference," information learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new information, whereas "retroactive interference" suggests that newly gathered information interferes with already existing information. Our goal was to examine the possible effect of both mechanisms in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger, which does not use pheromone recruitment, when learning spatial information while searching for food in a maze. Our experiment indicated that neither proactive nor retroactive interference took place in this system although this awaits confirmation with individual-level learning assays. Rather, the ants' persistence or readiness to search for food grew with successive runs in the maze. Elevated persistence led to more ant workers arriving at the food when retested a day later, even if the maze was shifted between runs. We support this finding in a second experiment, where ant workers reached the food reward at the maze end in higher numbers after encountering food in the maze entry compared to a treatment, in which food was present only at the maze end. This result suggests that spatial learning and search persistence are 2 parallel behavioral mechanisms, both assisting foraging ants. We suggest that their relative contribution should depend on habitat complexity.

Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
2022_Gilad_et_al_Integrative Zoology.pdf (616.58 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine Publication financée par une institution
Licence

Dates et versions

hal-04730500 , version 1 (10-10-2024)

Licence

Identifiants

Citer

Tomer Gilad, Arik Dorfman, Aziz Subach, Romain Libbrecht, Susanne Foitzik, et al.. Evidence for the effect of brief exposure to food, but not learning interference, on maze solving in desert ants. Integrative Zoology, 2022, 17 (5), pp.704 - 714. ⟨10.1111/1749-4877.12622⟩. ⟨hal-04730500⟩
67 Consultations
116 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

  • More