Abstract
Insect navigation and adaptive behaviors rely on the integration of olfactory cues with environmental reinforcement. Using a custom floating ball treadmill system, we investigated how sensory-motor dynamics and temporal diagrams interact during associative memory formation in the locust (Schistocerca americana). Baseline evaluation revealed that both appetitive hexanol and unappetitive citral consistently drive forward tracking while localized electrical shocks evoke immediate escape. This study explores whether aversive reinforcement can overcome the locust's inherent, non-systematic odor responses, effectively driving a transition toward deterministic behavioral control. Pairing olfactory conditioned stimuli (CS) with the aversive electrical shock unconditioned stimulus (US), we evaluated the learning-dependent transformation of innate tracking behaviors. We also explored how the temporal overlap between the CS and US dictate conditioning efficiency and memory consolidation dynamics. These findings elucidate the fine-grained spatiotemporal mechanisms through which sensory reinforcement and temporal protocols modulate insect motor control and learning, offering key behavioral insights for insect learning systems.
Committee Chair
Barani Raman
Committee Members
Ismael Seanez Shantanu Chakrabartty
Degree
Master of Science (MS)
Author's Department
Biomedical Engineering
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
Summer 8-13-2026
Language
English (en)
Recommended Citation
Xu, Quanchen, "Aversive Olfactory Conditioning and Locomotive Modulation in Locust" (2026). McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations. 1400.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/eng_etds/1400