THE NEURAL BASIS OF ASSOCIATIVE REWARD LEARNING IN HONEYBEES

Appetitive learning of food-predicting stimuli, an essential part of f oraging behavior in honeybees, follows the rules of associative learni ng, In the learning of odors as reward-predicting stimuli, an individu al neuron, one of a small group of large ascending neurons that serve principal brain neuropiles, mediates the reward and has experience-dep endent response properties,This implies that this neuron functions as an integral part of associative memory, might underlie more complex fe atures of learning, and could participate in the implementation of lea rning rules, Moreover, its structural properties suggest that it organ izes the interaction of functionally different neural nets during lear ning and experience-dependent behavior.