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Recent studies demonstrate that social interactions can have a profound influence on Drosophila melanogaster behavior [1–8] and cuticular pheromone patterns [8–10]. Olfactory memory performance has mostly been investigated in groups, and previous studies have reported that grouped flies do not interact with each other and behave in the same way as individual flies during short-term memory retrieval [11–13]. However, the influence of social effects on the two known forms of Drosophila long-lasting associative memory, anesthesia-resistant memory (ARM) and long-term memory (LTM), has never been reported. We show here that ARM is displayed by individual flies but is socially facilitated; flies trained for ARM interact within a group to improve their conditioned performance. In contrast, testing shows LTM improvement in individual flies rather than in a group. We show that the social facilitation of ARM during …