Learning and attention allow animals to better navigate complex environments. While foraging, honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) learn several aspects of their foraging environment, such as color and odor of flowers, which likely begins to happen before they evaluate the quality of the food. If bees begin to evaluate quality before they taste food, and then learn the food is depleted, this may create a conflict in what the bee learns and remembers. Individual honey bees differ in their sensitivity to information, thus creating variation in how they learn or do not learn certain environmental stimuli. For example, foraging honey bees exhibit differences in latent inhibition (LI), a learning process through which regular encounter with a stimulus without a consequence such as food can later reduce conditioning to that stimulus. Here, we test whether bees from distinct selected LI genotypes learn differently if reinforced via just antennae or via both antennae + proboscis. We also evaluate whether learned information goes extinct at different rates in these distinct LI genetic lines. We find that high LI bees learned significantly better when they were reinforced both antenna + proboscis, while low LI and control bees learned similarly with the two reinforcement pathways. We also find no differences in the acquisition and extinction of learned information in high LI and low LI bees. Our work provides insight into how underlying cognition may influence how honey bees learn and value information, which may lead to differences in how individuals and colonies make foraging decisions.

中文翻译：

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可遗传的认知表型影响蜜蜂的食欲学习，但不影响蜜蜂的灭绝

学习和注意力使动物能够更好地驾驭复杂的环境。在觅食时，蜜蜂 (Apis mellifera L.) 了解其觅食环境的几个方面，例如花朵的颜色和气味，这可能在它们评估食物质量之前就开始发生。如果蜜蜂在品尝食物之前就开始评估质量，然后得知食物已经耗尽，这可能会在蜜蜂学习和记忆的内容上产生冲突。个体蜜蜂对信息的敏感性不同，因此它们学习或不学习某些环境刺激的方式会有所不同。例如，觅食的蜜蜂在潜伏抑制 (LI) 方面表现出差异，这是一个学习过程，通过这个学习过程，经常遇到没有后果的刺激，例如食物，以后可以减少对该刺激的调节。这里，我们测试了来自不同选定 LI 基因型的蜜蜂是否通过仅触角或通过触角 + 长鼻进行强化时的学习方式不同。我们还评估了在这些不同的 LI 基因系中学习到的信息是否以不同的速率消失。我们发现高 LI 蜜蜂在天线 + 口鼻都被强化时学习得更好，而低 LI 蜜蜂和对照蜜蜂在两种强化途径中的学习相似。我们还发现高 LI 和低 LI 蜜蜂在学习信息的获取和消失方面没有差异。我们的工作提供了对潜在认知如何影响蜜蜂学习和价值信息的方式的洞察，这可能导致个体和蜂群如何做出觅食决定的差异。