Ants store long- and short-term memories on different sides of their brains

Ants store long- and short-term memories on different sides of their brains

4 years ago
Anonymous $pSba0tWIcA

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/ants-store-long-and-short-term-memories-different-sides-their-brains

The left and right sides of our brains store different kinds of memories: The left side specializes in verbal information, for example, while the right side specializes in visual information. But it turns out we’re not the only ones. A new study suggests that ants—like humans, songbirds, and zebrafish—also store different memories in different sides of their tiny brains, in a process called lateralization.

Honey bees and bumblebees seem to exhibit lateralization when it comes to memories involving scent. But researchers wanted to know whether other insects were also dividing up the labor of their brains. They trained wood ants (Formica rufa) just as Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained his famous dogs—by treating them with food each time they received a certain signal.