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First published online February 15, 2006
Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 826-833 (2006)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2006
doi: 10.1242/jeb.02069

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Taste discrimination in conditioned taste aversion of the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis

Rio Sugai¹, Hatsuki Shiga¹, Sachiyo Azami¹, Takayuki Watanabe¹, Hisayo Sadamoto^1,2, Yutaka Fujito³, Ken Lukowiak⁴ and Etsuro Ito^1,5,*

¹ Division of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, North 10, West 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan
² Laboratory of Functional Biology, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Kagawa Campus, Tokushima Bunri University, 1314-1 Shido, Sanuki 769-2193, Japan
³ Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Sapporo Medical University, South 1, West 17, Chuo-ku, Sapporo 060-8556, Japan
⁴ Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 4N1, Canada
⁵ Division of Innovative Research, Creative Research Initiative "Sousei" (CRIS), Hokkaido University, North 21, West 10, Kita-ku, Sapporo 001-0021, Japan

^* Author for correspondence (e-mail: eito{at}sci.hokudai.ac.jp)

Accepted 3 January 2006

Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) in the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis has been widely used as a model for gaining an understanding of the molecular and behavioral mechanisms underlying learning and memory. At the behavioral level, however, it is still unclear how taste discrimination and CTA interact. We thus examined how CTA to one taste affected the feeding response induced by another appetitive food stimulus. We first demonstrated that snails have the capacity to recognize sucrose and carrot juice as distinct appetitive stimuli. We then found that snails can become conditioned (i.e. CTA) to avoid one of the stimuli and not the other. These results show that snails can distinguish between appetitive stimuli during CTA, suggesting that taste discrimination is processed upstream of the site where memory consolidation in the snail brain occurs. Moreover, we examined second-order conditioning with two appetitive stimuli and one aversive stimulus. Snails acquired second-order conditioning and were still able to distinguish between the different stimuli. Finally, we repeatedly presented the conditional stimulus alone to the conditioned snails, but this procedure did not extinguish the long-term memory of CTA in the snails. Taken together, our data suggest that CTA causes specific, irreversible and rigid changes from appetitive stimuli to aversive ones in the conditioning procedure.

Key words: conditioned taste aversion, long-term memory, Lymnaea stagnalis, second-order conditioning, taste discrimination

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