Published:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015
Published in:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (2015) 43
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1508422112
ISSN:
0027-8424;
1091-6490
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
Significance Mushroom bodies are prominent structures of the insect brain that have been associated with the storage and retrieval of elemental forms of memory. We took advantage of the unique cognitive capabilities of honey bees to uncover a previously unidentified function for these structures. Because the honey bee is the only insect in which higher-order, configural learning has been demonstrated, we asked whether the mushroom bodies of this insect are necessary for this task. Disrupting reversibly mushroom body function upon configural conditioning, we show that these structures are required for the acquisition of configural, but not of elemental, learning. This functionality resembles that of the vertebrate brain, where different brain regions are recruited for learning forms of different complexity.