Professor Aike Guo and colleagues modified the classical visual flight simulator so that both visual and olfactory conditioning of an individual fly could be carried out both separately (unimodal) and combined (cross-modal) in the same flight simulator. They found that conditioning with concurrent visual and olfactory cues reduced the threshold for unimodal memory retrieval in Drosophila reinforcement learning. Furthermore, bimodal preconditioning followed by unimodal conditioning with either a visual or olfactory cue led to crossmodal memory transfer. Crossmodal memory acquisition in Drosophila may contribute significantly to learning in a natural environment.

This work was published on Science (2005, 309(5732):307-310).