Conditioned behavior in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Populations of Drosophila were trained by alternately exposing them to two odorants, one coupled with electric shock. On testing, the flies avoided the shock-associated odor. Pseudoconditioning, excitatory states, odor preference, sensitization, habituation, and subjective bias have been eliminated as explanations. The selective avoidance can be extinguished by retraining. All flies in the population have equal probability of expressing this behavior. Memory persists for 24 hr. Another paradigm has been developed in which flies learn to discriminate between light sources of different color.