Reward expectations direct learning and drive operant matching in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: Foraging animals must use decision-making strategies that dynamically adapt to the changing availability of rewards in the environment. A wide diversity of animals do this by distributing their choices in proportion to the rewards received from each option, Herrnstein's operant matching law. Theoretical work suggests an elegant mechanistic explanation for this ubiquitous behavior, as operant matching follows automatically from simple synaptic plasticity rules acting within behaviorally relevant neural circuits. However, no past work has mapped operant matching onto plasticity mechanisms in the brain, leaving the biological relevance of the theory unclear. Here, we discovered operant matching in Drosophila and showed that it requires synaptic plasticity that acts in the mushroom body

SUBMITTER: Rajagopalan AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10523640 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature