Ants resort to heuristics when facing relational-learning tasks they cannot solve

Oberhauser, Felix B.; Koch, Alexandra; Agrò, Massimo De; Rex, K.; Czaczkes, Tomer J.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.1262

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…This can be seen in an interaction between correct side and the binary test, with ants in the 0.2 M vs. 0.4 M test making fewer correct decisions than in the 0.4 M vs 0.8 M test when the correct direction was right, but not when it was left (Z = − 2.17, P = 0.03). Side biases are commonly reported in ants (Hunt et al 2014;Oberhauser et al 2020).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Decoy effects, a subcategory of menu effects, have been studied in ants and honeybees along two trade-off dimensions (Sasaki and Pratt 2011;Tan et al 2014), but extending into multiple trade-off dimensions has so far been limited by the prohibitive training requirements. L. niger offers itself as an ideal model here, as not only can it learn rapidly, but can also rapidly make multi-modal associations (De Agrò et al 2020), and can be induced to make many tens of repeat visits in a limited time period (Oberhauser et al 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Very rapid multi-odour discrimination learning in the ant Lasius niger

Czaczkes

Kumar

2020

Insect. Soc.

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Insects can be very good learners. For example, they can form associations between a cue and a reward after only one exposure. Discrimination learning, in which multiple cues are associated with different outcomes, is critical for responding correctly complex environments. However, the extent of such discrimination learning is not well explored. Studies concerning discrimination learning within one valence are also rare. Here we ask whether Lasius niger ants can form multiple concurrent associations to different reward levels, and how rapidly such associations can be learned. We allowed individual workers to sequentially feed on up to four different food qualities, each associated with a different odour cue. Using pairwise preference tests, we found that ants can successfully learn at least two, and likely three, odour/quality associations, requiring as little as one exposure to each combination in order for learning to take place. By testing preference between two non-extreme values (i.e. between 0.4 M and 0.8 M having been trained to the qualities 0.2, 0.4, 0.8 and 1.6) we exclude the possibility that ants are only memorising the best and worst values in a set. Such rapid learning of multiple associations, within one valence and one modality, is impressive, and makes Lasius niger a very tractable model for complex training paradigms.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Very rapid multi-odour discrimination learning in the ant Lasius niger

Czaczkes

Kumar

2020

Insect. Soc.

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“…The display of repetitive behaviours and simple navigation rules, such as the formation of a side bias, has previously been described when ants are confronted with complex tasks (Macquart et al, 2008;Oberhauser et al, 2020). However, the ability to form side bias might have blocked the ants' ability to learn to avoid pheromone trails in the presented task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…By developing a simple rule (‘always choose one side and correct if wrong’), they were able to dramatically increase their foraging efficiency. Individual ants can thus develop effective solutions to problems that are beyond their cognitive limitations, by relying on simple rules ( Oberhauser et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hard limits to cognitive flexibility: ants can learn to ignore but not avoid pheromone trails

Wenig

Bach

Czaczkes

2021

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Learning allows animals to respond to changes in their environment within their lifespan. However, many responses to the environment are innate, and need not be learned. Depending on the level of cognitive flexibility an animal shows, such responses can either be modified by learning or not. Many ants deposit pheromone trails to resources, and innately follow such trails. Here, we investigated cognitive flexibility in the ant Lasius niger by asking whether ants can overcome their innate tendency and learn to avoid conspecific pheromone trails when these predict a negative stimulus. Ants were allowed to repeatedly visit a Y-maze, one arm of which was marked with a strong but realistic pheromone trail and led to a punishment (electroshock and/or quinine solution), and the other arm of which was unmarked and led to a 1 M sucrose reward. After circa 10 trials ants stopped relying on the pheromone trail, but even after 25 exposures they failed to improve beyond chance levels. However, the ants did not choose randomly: rather, most ants begun to favour just one side of the Y-maze, a strategy which resulted in more efficient food retrieval over time, when compared to the first visits. Even when trained in a go/no-go paradigm which precludes side bias development, ants failed to learn to avoid a pheromone trail. These results show rapid learning flexibility towards an innate social signal, but also demonstrate a rarely seen hard limit to this flexibility.

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“…13,14 Several suboptimal choices made by nonhuman animals could be deemed to be based doi: 10.1111/nyas.14730 on heuristic principles, yet such behaviors are rarely adequately acknowledged. 15 Given that heuristics are shortcuts to decisions, animals are expected to implement these strategies under uncertainty, 16 during highly complex tasks, 17 or in urgency. Only later, environmental conditions allowing, or if the goal has not been achieved, animals may adjust their decisions accordingly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A heuristic underlies the search for relief inDrosophila melanogaster

Meda

Menti

Megighian

et al. 2021

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Humans rely on multiple types of sensory information to make decisions, and strategies that shorten decisionmaking time by taking into account fewer but essential elements of information are preferred to strategies that require complex analyses. Such shortcuts to decision making are known as heuristics. The identification of heuristic principles in species phylogenetically distant to humans would shed light on the evolutionary origin of speedaccuracy trade-offs and offer the possibility for investigating the brain representations of such trade-offs, urgency and uncertainty. By performing experiments on spatial learning in the invertebrate Drosophila melanogaster, we show that the fly's search strategies conform to a spatial heuristic-the nearest neighbor rule-to avoid bitter taste (a negative stimulation). That is, Drosophila visits a salient location closest to its current position to stop the negative stimulation; only if this strategy proves unsuccessful does the fly use other learned associations to avoid bitter taste. Characterizing a heuristic in D. melanogaster supports the view that invertebrates can, when making choices, operate on economic principles, as well as the conclusion that heuristic decision making dates to at least 600 million years ago.

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Ants resort to heuristics when facing relational-learning tasks they cannot solve

Cited by 7 publications

References 68 publications

Very rapid multi-odour discrimination learning in the ant Lasius niger

Very rapid multi-odour discrimination learning in the ant Lasius niger

Hard limits to cognitive flexibility: ants can learn to ignore but not avoid pheromone trails

A heuristic underlies the search for relief inDrosophila melanogaster

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