Hard limits to cognitive flexibility: ants can learn to ignore but not avoid pheromone trails.

ABSTRACT: Learning allows animals to respond to changes in their environment within their lifespan. However, many responses to the environment are innate, and need not be learned. Depending on the level of cognitive flexibility an animal shows, such responses can either be modified by learning or not. Many ants deposit pheromone trails to resources, and innately follow such trails. Here, we investigated cognitive flexibility in the ant Lasius niger by asking whether ants can overcome their innate tendency and learn to avoid conspecific pheromone trails when these predict a negative stimulus. Ants were allowed to repeatedly visit a Y-maze, one arm of which was marked with a strong but realistic pheromone trail and led to a punishment (electric shock and/or quinine solution), and the other arm of whic

SUBMITTER: Wenig K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8214833 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature