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meeting posters and abstracts [ posters presented at meetings and their abstracts ]
| Double dissociation of PKC and adenylyl cyclase manipulations on operant and classical learning | |||
| Author | Björn Brembs | ||
| Author email | bjoern©brembs.net | ||
| Author website | http://brembs.net | ||
| Description | In three different discriminative conditioning experiments, the fly was fixed in space with head and thorax, but was free to beat its wings, move its legs, etc., while its yaw torque was being recorded. In order to train the fly to discriminate between a punished and an unpunished situation, an infrared light beam served as punishment. The task was to discriminate either using classical predictors, operant predictors or a combination of both predictors. I genetically manipulated two different intracellular pathways and tested the flies in all three paradigms. The fly strains used were rut-mutants and a transgenic line expressing a specific inhibitor of PKC (PKCi) under the control of a heat-shock promoter. First, I tested the flies for learning the color predictor alone. Extending previous experiments, rut-flies are deficient in the color-learning paradigm, while flies expressing PKCi are not. The results are reversed in the purely operant paradigm. While rut-flies show unaffected learning, the learning score in flies expressing high levels of PKCi fails to reach statistical significance. Finally, the failure only of rut-flies to master the composite task is evidence that in learning situations consisting of operant and classical components, the classical predictor is learned preferentially over the operant predictor. | ||
| Image | no image available | ||
| Filesize | 1.71 MB | ||
| Downloads | 3706 | ||
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