Flexible specificity of memory in Drosophila depends on a comparison between choices
- Janelia Research Campus, United States
- Aix-Marseille University, France
Abstract
Memory guides behavior across widely varying environments and must therefore be both sufficiently specific and general. A memory too specific will be useless in even a slightly different environment, while an overly general memory may lead to suboptimal choices. Animals successfully learn to both distinguish between very similar stimuli and generalize across cues. Rather than forming memories that strike a balance between specificity and generality, Drosophila can flexibly categorize a given stimulus into different groups depending on the options available. We asked how this flexibility manifests itself in the well-characterized learning and memory pathways of the fruit fly. We show that flexible categorization in neuronal activity as well as behavior depends on the order and identity of the perceived stimuli. Our results identify the neural correlates of flexible stimulus-categorization in the fruit fly.
Data availability
All data have been uploaded to Dryad
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Flexible specificity of memory in Drosophila depends on a comparison between choicesDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.8931zcrtc.
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Author details
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Yoshinori Aso
- Glenn C Turner
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Modi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Flexible specificity of memory in Drosophila depends on a comparison between choices
eLife 12:e80923.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80923
