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The Journal of Neuroscience, May 9, 2007, 27(19):5139-5145; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0472-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Experience Improves Feature Extraction in Drosophila

Yueqing Peng,^1,2 Wang Xi,^1,2 Wei Zhang,^1,2 Ke Zhang,^1,2 and Aike Guo^1,3

¹Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory for Neurobiology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China, ²Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China, and ³State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Aike Guo at the above address. Email: akguo{at}ion.ac.cn

Previous exposure to a pattern in the visual scene can enhance subsequent recognition of that pattern in many species from honeybees to humans. However, whether previous experience with a visual feature of an object, such as color or shape, can also facilitate later recognition of that particular feature from multiple visual features is largely unknown. Visual feature extraction is the ability to select the key component from multiple visual features. Using a visual flight simulator, we designed a novel protocol for visual feature extraction to investigate the effects of previous experience on visual reinforcement learning in Drosophila. We found that, after conditioning with a visual feature of objects among combinatorial shape-color features, wild-type flies exhibited poor ability to extract the correct visual feature. However, the ability for visual feature extraction was greatly enhanced in flies trained previously with that visual feature alone. Moreover, we demonstrated that flies might possess the ability to extract the abstract category of "shape" but not a particular shape. Finally, this experience-dependent feature extraction is absent in flies with defective MBs, one of the central brain structures in Drosophila. Our results indicate that previous experience can enhance visual feature extraction in Drosophila and that MBs are required for this experience-dependent visual cognition.

Key words: learning and memory; Drosophila; mushroom body; visual feature; experience-dependent behavior; flight simulator

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Received Oct. 16, 2006; revised March 26, 2007; accepted March 27, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Aike Guo at the above address. Email: akguo{at}ion.ac.cn

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. G. Dyer, M. G. P. Rosa, and D. H. Reser Honeybees can recognise images of complex natural scenes for use as potential landmarks J. Exp. Biol., April 15, 2008; 211(8): 1180 - 1186. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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