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Insect Behavioral Evidence of Spatial Memories During Environmental Reconfiguration

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Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems (Living Machines 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10928))

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Abstract

Insects are great explorers, able to navigate through long-distance trajectories and successfully find their way back. Their navigational routes cross dynamic environments suggesting adaptation to novel configurations. Arthropods and vertebrates share neural organizational principles and it has been shown that rodents modulate their neural spatial representation accordingly with environmental changes. However, it is unclear whether insects reflexively adapt to environmental changes or retain memory traces of previously explored situations. We sought to disambiguate between insect behavior in environmental novel situations and reconfiguration conditions. An immersive mixed-reality multi-sensory setup was built to replicate multi-sensory cues. We have designed an experimental setup where female crickets Gryllus Bimaculatus were trained to move towards paired auditory and visual cues during primarily phonotactic driven behavior. We hypothesized that insects were capable of identifying sensory modifications in known environments. Our results show that, regardless of the animal’s history, novel situation conditions did not compromise the animals performance and navigational directionality towards a new target location. However, in trials where visual and auditory stimuli were spatially decoupled, the animals heading variability towards a previously known position significantly increased. Our findings showed that crickets can behaviorally manifest environmental reconfiguration, suggesting the encoding for spatial representation.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. [341196] cDAC.

Author Contributions Statement. Z.M. and P.V. conceived the experiment, D.S.P. conducted the experiment and analyzed the results. D.S.P, Z.M., and A.E developed the setup. All authors were involved in the revision of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SPECS, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    Diogo Santos-Pata, Alex Escuredo & Paul F. M. J. Verschure

  2. SPECS, Univesitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Diogo Santos-Pata, Alex Escuredo, Zenon Mathews & Paul F. M. J. Verschure

  3. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanats (ICREA), 08010, Barcelona, Spain

    Paul F. M. J. Verschure

Authors
  1. Diogo Santos-Pata
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  2. Alex Escuredo
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  3. Zenon Mathews
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  4. Paul F. M. J. Verschure
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diogo Santos-Pata .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. SPECS, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Vasiliki Vouloutsi

  2. Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des, Université Paris Diderot, Paris Cedex 13, France

    José Halloy

  3. SPECS, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Anna Mura

  4. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Michael Mangan

  5. Bristol University, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Nathan Lepora

  6. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Tony J. Prescott

  7. SPECS, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Paul F.M.J. Verschure

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Santos-Pata, D., Escuredo, A., Mathews, Z., Verschure, P.F.M.J. (2018). Insect Behavioral Evidence of Spatial Memories During Environmental Reconfiguration. In: Vouloutsi , V., et al. Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10928. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95972-6_45

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95972-6_45

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95971-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95972-6

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