How Brain Connections Change When A Fly Learns (IMAGE)

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

How Brain Connections Change When A Fly Learns

Caption

A singe dopamine neuron (yellow) in the mushroom body of the fruit fly Drosophila. Glenn Turner and colleagues trained flies to avoid certain odors by pairing them with stimulations of dopamine neurons signaling punishment. They found that this form of associative learning is driven by changes in synaptic strength between mushroom body neurons that process odors and downstream neurons that generate behavioral responses.

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Turner Lab, CSHL

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