Cognitive Aspects of Comb-Building in the Honeybee?

Gallo, Vincent; Chittka, Lars

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00900

Cited by 30 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…There is even some evidence to suggest similar psychological processes in flies as in humans, such as attention [ 16 , 21 , 67 ], memory [ 13 – 15 ] and feature binding [ 19 ]. Further similarities have been found for other insects, such as perception of illusory contours, metacognition, false memory, and long-term planning in bees [ 68 – 71 ].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster

et al. 2021

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The physical basis of consciousness remains one of the most elusive concepts in current science. One influential conjecture is that consciousness is to do with some form of causality, measurable through information. The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) proposes that conscious experience, filled with rich and specific content, corresponds directly to a hierarchically organised, irreducible pattern of causal interactions; i.e. an integrated informational structure among elements of a system. Here, we tested this conjecture in a simple biological system (fruit flies), estimating the information structure of the system during wakefulness and general anesthesia. Consistent with this conjecture, we found that integrated interactions among populations of neurons during wakefulness collapsed to isolated clusters of interactions during anesthesia. We used classification analysis to quantify the accuracy of discrimination between wakeful and anesthetised states, and found that informational structures inferred conscious states with greater accuracy than a scalar summary of the structure, a measure which is generally championed as the main measure of IIT. In stark contrast to a view which assumes feedforward architecture for insect brains, especially fly visual systems, we found rich information structures, which cannot arise from purely feedforward systems, occurred across the fly brain. Further, these information structures collapsed uniformly across the brain during anesthesia. Our results speak to the potential utility of the novel concept of an “informational structure” as a measure for level of consciousness, above and beyond simple scalar values.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster

et al. 2021

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“…There is even some evidence to suggest similar psychological processes in flies as in humans, such as attention [16,21,67] , memory [13][14][15] and feature binding [19] . Further similarities have been found for other insects, such as perception of illusory contours, metacognition, false memory, and long-term planning in bees [68][69][70][71] .…”

Section: Applying Iit To Loss Of Arousal In Fliessupporting

confidence: 57%

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal inDrosophila melanogaster

Leung

Cohen

Swinderen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The physical basis of consciousness remains one of the most elusive concepts in current science. One influential conjecture is that consciousness is to do with some form of causality, measurable through information. The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) proposes that conscious experience, filled with rich and specific content, corresponds directly to a hierarchically organised, irreducible pattern of causal interactions; i.e. an integrated informational structure among elements of a system. Here, we tested this conjecture in a simple biological system (fruit flies), estimating the information structure of the system during wakefulness and general anesthesia. We found that causal interactions among populations of neurons during wakefulness collapsed to isolated clusters of interactions during anesthesia. We used classification analysis to quantify the accuracy of discrimination between wakeful and anesthetised states, and found that informational structures inferred conscious states with greater accuracy than a scalar summary of the structure, a measure which is generally championed as the main measure of IIT. Spatially, we found that the information structures collapsed rather uniformly across the fly brain. Our results speak to the potential utility of the novel concept of an "informational structure" as a measure for level of consciousness, above and beyond simple scalar values. Author summaryThe physical basis of consciousness remains elusive. Efforts to measure consciousness have generally been restricted to simple, scalar quantities which summarise the complexity of a system, inspired by integrated information theory, which links a multi-dimensional, informational structure to the contents of experience in a system. Due to the complexity of the definition of the structure, assessment of its utility as a measure of conscious arousal in a system has largely been ignored. In this manuscript we evaluate the utility of such an information structure in measuring the level of consciousness in the fruit fly. Our results indicate that this structure can be more informative about the level of consciousness in a system than even the scalar summary proposed by the theory itself. These results may push consciousness research towards the notion of multi-dimensional informational structures, instead of traditional summaries.

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“…For Oeder and Schwabe (2017a, b) the tilt of the cells was an argument against the hypothesis that bees first build cylinders which are then transformed into hexagonal cells (Pirk et al 2004). There is also a widespread but unproven opinion in the literature which could be regarded as a "historical truth" that the inclination of the cells is to prevent the honey from leaking (Frisch 1959;Hüsing and Nitschmann 1987;Dietemann et al 2011;Tautz 2012;Gallo and Chittka 2018;Wahyudi 2018). This explanation seems to be so convincing and obvious that until today, scientists have not found it worthwhile to test its validity experimentally.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The upward tilt of honeycomb cells increases the carrying capacity of the comb and is not to prevent the outflow of honey

Oeder¹,

Schwabe

2020

Apidologie

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The cells of the combs of Apis mellifera are tilted upwards by approximately 13°. The literature says that this tilt serves to prevent the outflow of honey. We checked this by hanging empty honeycombs upside down into beehives. Honey was stored in these inverted honeycombs in the same way as in the normally oriented combs, and inverted combs were also well accepted for rearing the brood. We thus show that the benefit for the bees of the upward tilt of the cells is not to prevent leakage of honey. Honey is obviously in a Wenzel state on the hydrophobic, micro-structured cell walls. The associated wetting of the cell wall causes adhesion that prevents leakage. We propose that the benefit of the inclination of the cells is to direct about 10% of the weight of cell contents onto the midwall, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the comb.

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Cognitive Aspects of Comb-Building in the Honeybee?

Cited by 30 publications

References 51 publications

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal in Drosophila melanogaster

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal inDrosophila melanogaster

The upward tilt of honeycomb cells increases the carrying capacity of the comb and is not to prevent the outflow of honey

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