After the first session on molecular systems, a session of graduate students and postdocs followed, which was particularly interesting, because the data was presented by the people who actually collected the data, which I always find particularly attractive. Isaac Cervantes-Sandova presented very intriguing data on the action of DPM neurons (single neurons innervating the mushroom-bodies) after classical olfactory conditioning. He showed that appetitive and aversive conditioning lead to different activations of these neurons, providing a potential explanation for the different retention curves following appetitive vs. aversive conditioning. Theo Mota talked about occasion setting in honey bees, interesting work that we had already tlked about in our journal club and that is related to our own work on occasion setting in Drosophila. Tyler Ofstad presented work on visual place learning in Drosophila. His paradigm very much looked like a fly version of the Morris Water Maze for rats and mice. The floor of the arena where the flies (with clipped wings) walk is hot and only one spot is so cool the the flies would prefer to stay there. The walls of the arena display different visual patterns allowing the flies ot always find the cool spot, even if the patterns on the walls have been rotated to a different place. All the main features of this experiment mimick the Morris Water Maze experiments. They find that the ellipsoid body appears to be required for place learning but not the mushroom-bodies. They've also translated this paradigm into a single fly paradigm where the tethered fly walks on a ball suspended in an airstream and a virtual arena around the fly to provide the visual impression of navigating the arena.