10.5061/DRYAD.1NS1RN8V5
Finke, Valerie
0000-0002-7870-6519
Research Centre on Animal Cognition
Baracchi, David
Research Centre on Animal Cognition
Giurfa, Martin
0000-0001-7173-769X
Research Centre on Animal Cognition
Scheiner, Ricarda
0000-0002-7515-4253
University of Würzburg
Avarguès-Weber, Aurore
0000-0003-3160-6710
Research Centre on Animal Cognition
Evidence of cognitive spezialization in an insect: proficiency is
maintained across elemental and higher-order visual learning but not
between sensory modalities in honey bees
Dryad
dataset
2021
FOS: Biological sciences
2021-12-08T00:00:00Z
2021-12-08T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.242470
187772 bytes
6
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Individuals differing in their cognitive abilities and foraging strategies
may confer a valuable benefit to their social groups as variability may
help responding flexibly in scenarios with different resource
availability. Individual learning proficiency may either be absolute or
vary with the complexity or the nature of the problem considered.
Determining if learning abilities correlate between tasks of different
complexity or between sensory modalities has a high interest for research
on brain modularity and task-dependent specialisation of neural circuits.
The honeybee Apis mellifera constitutes an attractive model to address
this question due to its capacity to successfully learn a large range of
tasks in various sensory domains. Here we studied whether the performance
of individual bees in a simple visual discrimination task (a
discrimination between two visual shapes) is stable over time and
correlates with their capacity to solve either a higher-order visual task
(a conceptual discrimination based on spatial relations between objects)
or an elemental olfactory task (a discrimination between two odorants). We
found that individual learning proficiency within a given task was
maintained over time and that some individuals performed consistently
better than others within the visual modality, thus showing consistent
aptitude across visual tasks of different complexity. By contrast,
performance in the elemental visual-learning task did not predict
performance in the equivalent elemental olfactory task. Overall, our
results suggest the existence of cognitive specialisation within the hive,
which may contribute to ecological social success.