TY - JOUR T1 - Zebrafish dorsal habenula is required for updating learned behaviors JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/802256 SP - 802256 AU - Fabrizio Palumbo AU - Bram Serneels AU - Robbrecht Pelgrims AU - Emre Yaksi Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/13/802256.abstract N2 - Operant conditioning requires multiple cognitive processes, such as learning, consolidation, prediction of potential outcomes and decision making. It is less clear how interactions of these processes led to behavioral adaptations that allows animal to cope with changing environment. We first showed that juvenile zebrafish can perform conditioned place avoidance learning, with improving performance across development. Next, we disentangled operant conditioning from contextual fear and anxiety. Our results revealed that animals’ decisions and learning performance is shaped by the available information and animals’ experience. Ablation of dorsal habenula (dHb), a brain region involved in learning and prediction of outcomes, led to an unexpected improvement in animals learning performance and delayed memory extinction. Interestingly, while the control animals’ exhibit rapid adaptation to changing learning rules, dHb ablated animals failed to adapt. Altogether, our results showed that dHb plays a central role in switching animals’ strategies while integrating new evidences with prior experience. ER -