TY - JOUR
T1 - Irrational behavior in C. elegans arises from asymmetric modulatory effects within single sensory neurons
AU - Iwanir, Shachar
AU - Ruach, Rotem
AU - Itskovits, Eyal
AU - Pritz, Christian O.
AU - Bokman, Eduard
AU - Zaslaver, Alon
N1 - Funding Information: We thank Sergiu Hart, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Yonatan Lowenstein for fruitful discussions of this manuscript. Some strains were provided by the CGC, which is funded by the NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P40 OD010440). This study was funded by ERC (336803), ICORE, The American Federation for Aging Research, and ISF (1259/13, 1300/17) to AZ. COP postdoctoral fellowship is supported by the David-Herzog-Funds at Styrian Universities. EB, RR, and EI are supported by the Jerusalem Brain Center. AZ thanks the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Senior Lecture Chair fund. Publisher Copyright: © 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - C. elegans worms exhibit a natural chemotaxis towards food cues. This provides a potential platform to study the interactions between stimulus valence and innate behavioral preferences. Here we perform a comprehensive set of choice assays to measure worms’ relative preference towards various attractants. Surprisingly, we find that when facing a combination of choices, worms’ preferences do not always follow value-based hierarchy. In fact, the innate chemotaxis behavior in worms robustly violates key rationality paradigms of transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and regularity. These violations arise due to asymmetric modulatory effects between the presented options. Functional analysis of the entire chemosensory system at a single-neuron resolution, coupled with analyses of mutants, defective in individual neurons, reveals that these asymmetric effects originate in specific sensory neurons.
AB - C. elegans worms exhibit a natural chemotaxis towards food cues. This provides a potential platform to study the interactions between stimulus valence and innate behavioral preferences. Here we perform a comprehensive set of choice assays to measure worms’ relative preference towards various attractants. Surprisingly, we find that when facing a combination of choices, worms’ preferences do not always follow value-based hierarchy. In fact, the innate chemotaxis behavior in worms robustly violates key rationality paradigms of transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and regularity. These violations arise due to asymmetric modulatory effects between the presented options. Functional analysis of the entire chemosensory system at a single-neuron resolution, coupled with analyses of mutants, defective in individual neurons, reveals that these asymmetric effects originate in specific sensory neurons.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85069432257&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11163-3
DO - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11163-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 31324786
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 10
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 3202
ER -