PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Diogo Santos-Pata
AU  - Alex Escuredo
AU  - Zenon Mathews
AU  - Paul F.M.J. Verschure
TI  - Insect behavioral evidence of spatial memories during environmental reconfiguration
AID  - 10.1101/118687
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 118687
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/20/118687.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/20/118687.full
AB  - Insects are great explorers, able to navigate through long-distance trajectories and successfully find their way back. Their navigational routes cross dynamic environments suggesting adaptation to novel configurations. Arthropods and vertebrates share neural organizational principles and it has been shown that rodents modulate their neural spatial representation accordingly with environmental changes. However, it is unclear whether insects reflexively adapt to environmental changes or retain memory traces of previously explored situations. We sought to disambiguate between insect behavior at environmental novel situations and reconfiguration conditions. An immersive mixed-reality multi-sensory setup was built to replicate multi-sensory cues. We have designed an experimental setup where female crickets Gryllus Bimaculatus were trained to move towards paired auditory and visual cues during primarily phonotactic driven behavior. We hypothesized that insects were capable of identifying sensory modifications in known environments. Our results show that, regardless of the animals history, novel situation conditions did not compromise the animals performance and navigational directionality towards a novel target location. However, in trials where visual and auditory stimuli were spatially decoupled, the animals heading variability towards a previously known location significantly increased. Our findings showed that crickets are able to behaviorally manifest environmental reconfiguration, suggesting the encoding for spatial representation.