ArticlePloS one2018
Relationship between brain plasticity, learning and foraging performance in honey bees.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Behavioral disruption in honey bees (Apis mellifera) exposed to isolated and combined insecticides.Ecotoxicology (London, England) · 2026Article
- When a bigger brain is better: The case of bee olfactory learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Sex-Specific Neuroplasticity in the Brain of a Facultatively Social Orchid Bee.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Effect of aging and Varroa parasitism on the paracellular and transcellular permeability of the honeybee blood-brain barrier.PloS one · 2026Article
- Sub-lethal imidacloprid exposure leads to presynaptic and postsynaptic alterations.Research square · 2025Article
- 'Inert' co-formulants of a fungicide mediate acute effects on honey bee learning performance.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Patterns of host plant use do not explain mushroom body expansion in Heliconiini butterflies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Experience-dependent plasticity in the olfactory system ofFrontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2023Review
- Article
- Dynamically expressed single ELAV/Hu orthologue elavl2 of bees is required for learning and memory.Communications biology · 2021Article
- The Toll Route to Structural Brain Plasticity.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Review
- Plasticity and modulation of olfactory circuits in insects.Cell and tissue research · 2021Review
- Insecticide exposure during brood or early-adult development reduces brain growth and impairs adult learning in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Adult neurogenesis in the mushroom bodies of red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum, HERBST) is influenced by the olfactory environment.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Automated quantification of synaptic boutons reveals their 3D distribution in the honey bee mushroom body.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Reversal learning inLearning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- An Inconvenient Truth: Some Neglected Issues in Invertebrate Learning.Perspectives on behavior science · 2018Article
- Multiple Representations of Space by the Cockroach,Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Brain structure and learning capacities both vary with experience, but the mechanistic link between them is unclear. Here, we investigated whether experience-dependent variability in learning performance can be explained by neuroplasticity in foraging honey bees. The mushroom bodies (MBs) are a brain center necessary for ambiguous olfactory learning tasks such as reversal learning. Using radio frequency identification technology, we assessed the effects of natural variation in foraging activity, and the age when first foraging, on both performance in reversal learning and on synaptic connectivity in the MBs. We found that reversal learning performance improved at foraging onset and could decline with greater foraging experience. If bees started foraging before the normal age, as a result of a stress applied to the colony, the decline in learning performance with foraging experience was more severe. Analyses of brain structure in the same bees showed that the total number of synaptic boutons at the MB input decreased when bees started foraging, and then increased with greater foraging intensity. At foraging onset MB structure is therefore optimized for bees to update learned information, but optimization of MB connectivity deteriorates with foraging effort. In a computational model of the MBs sparser coding of information at the MB input improved reversal learning performance. We propose, therefore, a plausible mechanistic relationship between experience, neuroplasticity, and cognitive performance in a natural and ecological context.
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