The Zebrafish Dorsolateral Habenula Is Required for Updating Learned Behaviors

Highlights

• Conditioned place avoidance (CPA) learning improves across zebrafish development

• Juvenile zebrafish form long-term memories after multiple days of CPA training

• Ablation of the dorsolateral habenula (dlHb) delays memory extinction

• dlHb is important for behavioral flexibility to update learned behaviors

Summary

Operant learning requires multiple cognitive processes, such as learning, prediction of potential outcomes, and decision-making. It is less clear how interactions of these processes lead to the behavioral adaptations that allow animals to cope with a changing environment. We show that juvenile zebrafish can perform conditioned place avoidance learning, with improving performance across development. Ablation of the dorsolateral habenula (dlHb), a brain region involved in associative learning and prediction of outcomes, leads to an unexpected improvement in performance and delayed memory extinction. Interestingly, the control animals exhibit rapid adaptation to a changing learning rule, whereas dlHb-ablated animals fail to adapt. Altogether, our results show that the dlHb plays a central role in switching animals’ strategies while integrating new evidence with prior experience.