ABSTRACT
Animals socially interact during foraging to share information about the quality and location of food sources. The mechanisms of social information transfer during foraging have been mostly studied at the behavioral level, and its underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has become a model for studying the neural bases of social information transfer, as fruit flies show a rich repertoire of social behaviors and provide a well-developed genetic toolbox to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity. Social information transfer has already been characterized for fruit flies’ egg laying, mate choice, foraging and aversive associative learning, however the role of social information transfer on associative odor-food learning during foraging are unknown. Here we present an automated foraging assay for groups of walking flies that allows studying the effect of group size on the formation and expression of associative odor-food memories. We found that inter-fly attraction increases with group size and that groups of flies exhibit extended odor-food memory expression, as compared to single or pairs of flies. We discuss possible behavioral and neural mechanisms of this social effect on odor-food memory expression. This study opens up opportunities to investigate how social interactions are relayed in the neural circuitry of learning and memory expression.
