Olfactory experience shapes the evaluation of odour similarity in ants: a behavioural and computational analysis

What is it about?

In this article we describe our findings that ants generalize between odors in the sense that if they are trained with food rewards to respond to one odor, they will also respond to similar odors. This generalization response gets less when the odors become less similar - scientists in this field call it a generalization gradient. Furthermore, if there is another odor that is consistently not rewarded or punished, the generalization gradient changes, leading to so-called peak and area-shifts. We observe these in the ants' behavior and show for the first time that the interactions of positive (rewarded) and negative (unrewarded) generalization gradients are better described as multiplicative interactions than as summations, which is the classical theoretical description in the literature.

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Why is it important?

There are a number of aspects important in this work. The two most important ones that we have augmented the observation of generalization gradients to ants and that we are beginning to challenge the common assumption of describing generalization gradients as potentials with additive interactions.

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