Data from: Using an insect mushroom body circuit to encode route memory in complex natural environments

Ants, like many other animals, use visual memory to follow extended routes
through complex environments, but it is unknown how their small brains
implement this capability. The mushroom body neuropils have been
identified as a crucial memory circuit in the insect brain, but their
function has mostly been explored for simple olfactory association tasks.
We show that a spiking neural model of this circuit originally developed
to describe fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) olfactory association, can
also account for the ability of desert ants (Cataglyphis velox) to rapidly
learn visual routes through complex natural environments. We further
demonstrate that abstracting the key computational principles of this
circuit, which include one-shot learning of sparse codes, enables the
theoretical storage capacity of the ant mushroom body to be estimated at
hundreds of independent images.