Margot Perez's research while affiliated with Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 and other places

... Previous studies have found mixed results on the relationship between aggression and learning. In the ant Camponotus aethiops, aggression was not related to learning speed (Udino et al., 2017). In contrast, in the rodents Myodes glareolus and Cavia aperea, more aggressive individuals were faster at associative learning and slower at reversal learning (Guenther et al., 2014;Mazza et al., 2018). ...

... Work on ants has shown that previously generalized odor pairs can be discriminated after training with differential conditioning, implying that the behavioral-discrimination measured was contextual [32]. Indeed, the role of experience in generalization behavior has been demonstrated in multiple studies [37,38]. This behaviorallydemonstrated ability to dynamically shift discrimination thresholds in insects has been supported by work showing that learning can modulate neural activity within the antennal lobe [16,17]. ...

... Based on our chemical analysis, we found that some tumour-bearing individuals were similar to the sham ones. This does not mean that ants were not able to discriminate the small tumour individuals from the sham ones, as ants are able to detect compounds at a very low concentrations [29]. During our behaviour tests, we randomly assigned each ant to the odour of three different mice during the conditioning, and six other mice during the memory tests (three from the conditioned group and three from the other group). ...

... Such learning abilities were already described in this species [11], but also in other ant species, like Lasius niger [22], Camponotus spp. [23][24][25] and Linepithema humile [26,27]. Odours used in these studies were pure compounds (e.g. ...

... The response threshold model has been extremely in uential to explain division of labor and its relation to colony organization. Although specialization in nectar or pollen foraging remains as the best-studied case of how variations in behavioral responsiveness can result in task specialization, the predictions of the model have also been tested in other social insects (23). In colonies of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), sucrose responsiveness tested in nectar foragers (capture during collection) was similar to pollen foragers, but higher than in bees that collected both resources, suggesting that foragers that are specialized in collecting nectar are more sensitive to sucrose than those with a more diversi ed collecting behavior (24). ...