Experience-dependent tuning of early olfactory processing in the adult brain

Experience-dependent plasticity in the central nervous system allows an animal to adaptively change their responses to stimuli over different time scales. In this study we explored the different time frames and mechanisms over which olfactory experience-dependent plasticity works. We measured the impact of experience on early olfactory processing by comparing naturally foraging animals with a diverse olfactory experience to animals from the same cohort that experienced a chronic reduction in adult olfactory experience. We placed age-matched sets of full-sister honey bees, Apis mellifera, into two different olfactory conditions, in which animals were allowed to forage ad libitum. In one condition (T), we reduced the olfactory experience of foraging bees by placing them in a tent in which both sucrose and pollen resources were associated with a single odor. In the second condition (F), bees were allowed to forage freely and therefore receive a diversity of naturally occurring resource-associated olfactory experiences. We found that bees with a reduced olfactory experience had less developed antennal lobes when compared to experienced foragers, suggesting early-adult sensory experience influences the development of olfactory processing. We next measured the antennal lobe glomerular responses to odors using calcium imaging, and found that diverse olfactory experience of bees also enhances the inter-individual variation in the glomerular response profiles to odors. Last, we measured the impact of this treatment in an olfactory learning assay. We found that bees with a reduced olfactory experience had more difficulty picking an odor out of a mixture, which led them to generalize more (or respond similarly) to different mixture components than bees with richer olfactory experiences. Our study highlights the impact of individual experience at multiple levels (i.e., behavioral, physiological, developmental) on early olfactory processing.