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Using an Insect Mushroom Body Circuit to Encode Route Memory in Complex Natural Environments | PLOS Computational Biology

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Author Summary We propose a model based directly on insect neuroanatomy that is able to account for the route following capabilities of ants. We show this mushroom body circuit has the potential to store a large number of images, generated in a realistic simulation of an ant traversing a route, and to distinguish previously stored images from highly similar images generated when looking in the wrong direction. It can thus control successful recapitulation of routes under ecologically valid test conditions.

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Ants, like many other animals, use visual memory to follow extended routes through complex environments, but it is unknown how their small brains implement this capability. The mushroom body neuropils have been identified as a crucial memory circuit in the insect brain, but their function has mostly been explored for simple olfactory association tasks. We show that a spiking neural model of this circuit originally developed to describe fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) olfactory association, can also account for the ability of desert ants (Cataglyphis velox) to rapidly learn visual routes through complex natural environments. We further demonstrate that abstracting the key computational principles of this circuit, which include one-shot learning of sparse codes, enables the theoretical storage capacity of the ant mushroom body to be estimated at hundreds of independent images.

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Memory,Ants,Vision,Learning,Neurons,Synapses,Animal navigation,Insects

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https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004683

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Using an Insect Mushroom Body Circuit to Encode Route Memory in Complex Natural Environments

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Author Summary We propose a model based directly on insect neuroanatomy that is able to account for the route following capabilities of ants. We show this mushroom body circuit has the potential to store a large number of images, generated in a realistic simulation of an ant traversing a route, and to distinguish previously stored images from highly similar images generated when looking in the wrong direction. It can thus control successful recapitulation of routes under ecologically valid test conditions.

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https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004683.g006&size=inline

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ploscompbiol

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Using an Insect Mushroom Body Circuit to Encode Route Memory in Complex Natural Environments

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Using an Insect Mushroom Body Circuit to Encode Route Memory in Complex Natural Environments

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