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J Exp Biol

Title:		Hard limits to cognitive flexibility: ants can learn to ignore but not avoid pheromone trails
Author(s):		Wenig K; Bach R; Czaczkes TJ;
Address:		"Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, 1090Vienna, Austria. Animal Comparative Economics Laboratory, Department of Zoology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany"
Journal Title:		J Exp Biol
Year:		2021
Volume:		20210604
Issue:		11
Page Number:		-
DOI:		10.1242/jeb.242454
ISSN/ISBN:		1477-9145 (Electronic) 0022-0949 (Print) 0022-0949 (Linking)
Abstract:		"Learning allows animals to respond to changes in their environment within their lifespan. However, many responses to the environment are innate, and need not be learned. Depending on the level of cognitive flexibility an animal shows, such responses can either be modified by learning or not. Many ants deposit pheromone trails to resources, and innately follow such trails. Here, we investigated cognitive flexibility in the ant Lasius niger by asking whether ants can overcome their innate tendency and learn to avoid conspecific pheromone trails when these predict a negative stimulus. Ants were allowed to repeatedly visit a Y-maze, one arm of which was marked with a strong but realistic pheromone trail and led to a punishment (electric shock and/or quinine solution), and the other arm of which was unmarked and led to a 1 mol l-1 sucrose reward. After ca. 10 trials, ants stopped relying on the pheromone trail, but even after 25 exposures they failed to improve beyond chance levels. However, the ants did not choose randomly: rather, most ants began to favour just one side of the Y-maze, a strategy which resulted in more efficient food retrieval over time, when compared with the first visits. Even when trained in a go/no-go paradigm which precludes side bias development, ants failed to learn to avoid a pheromone trail. These results show rapid learning flexibility towards an innate social signal, but also demonstrate a rarely seen hard limit to this flexibility"
Keywords:		Animals *Ants Cognition Feeding Behavior Learning Pheromones Anti-instinctive learning Associative learning Chemical communication Opposite-instinctive learning Social signal;
Notes:		"MedlineWenig, Katharina Bach, Richard Czaczkes, Tomer J eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't England 2021/06/05 J Exp Biol. 2021 Jun 1; 224(11):jeb242454. doi: 10.1242/jeb.242454. Epub 2021 Jun 4"