Pattern recognition in honeybees: eidetic imagery and orientation discrimination

SUMMARYVisual perception is a primary modality for interacting with complex environments. Recent work has shown that the brain and visual system of the honeybee is able, in some cases, to learn complex spatial relationships, while in other cases, bee vision is relatively rudimentary and based upon simple elemental-type visual processing. In the present study, we test the ability of honeybees to learn 4-bar asymmetric patterns in a Y-maze with aversive-appetitive differential conditioning. In Experiment 1, a group of bees were trained at a small visual angle of 50deg by constraining individuals to the decision chamber within the Ymaze. Bees learned this task, and were able to solve the task even in the presence of background noise. However, these bees failed to solve the task when the stimuli were presented at a novel visual angle of 100deg. In Experiment 2, a separate group of bees were trained to sets of 4-bar asymmetric patterns that excluded retinotopic matching and, in this case, bees learned the configural rule describing stimuli at a visual angle of approximately 50deg, and this allowed the bees to solve the task when the stimuli were presented at a novel vision angle of 100deg. This shows that the bee brain contains multiple mechanisms for pattern recognition, and what a bee sees is very dependent upon the specific experience that it receives. These multiple mechanisms would allow bees to interact with complex environments to solve tasks like recognising landmarks at variable distances or quickly discriminating between rewarding/non-rewarding flowers at reasonable constant visual angles. Supplementary material available online at

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Seeing near and seeing far; behavioural evidence for dual mechanisms of pattern vision in the honeybee (Apis mellifera)

Dyer

Griffiths

2012

“…In another insect model, Drosophila, it has recently been shown that experience with visual stimuli improves feature extraction from complex visual stimuli, and that the mushroom body region of the brain is critical in shape feature extraction (Peng et al, 2007). Two possible mechanisms by which insects might recognise visual stimuli include a retinotopictemplate strategy and/or the use of specific features extracted from a scene (Efler and Ronacher, 2000;Giger and Srinivasan, 1995;Horridge, 2005;Stach et al, 2004;Stach and Giurfa, 2005). In Drosophila (Dill et al, 1993;Peng et al, 2007) and ants (Cartwright and Collett, 1983;Graham et al, 2007) there is evidence that these insects use a retinotopic-template strategy, and in bees there is evidence that individuals use feature extraction, which may develop into configural type processing with experience (Stach et al, 2004;Stach and Giurfa, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honeybees can recognise images of complex natural scenes for use as potential landmarks

Dyer

Rosa

Reser

2008

SUMMARYThe ability to navigate long distances to find rewarding flowers and return home is a key factor in the survival of honeybees (Apis mellifera). To reliably perform this task, bees combine both odometric and landmark cues, which potentially creates a dilemma since environments rich in odometric cues might be poor in salient landmark cues, and vice versa. In the present study, honeybees were provided with differential conditioning to images of complex natural scenes, in order to determine if they could reliably learn to discriminate between very similar scenes, and to recognise a learnt scene from a novel distractor scene. Choices made by individual bees were modelled with signal detection theory, and bees demonstrated an ability to discriminate between perceptually similar target and distractor views despite similar spatiotemporal content of the images. In a non-rewarded transfer test bees were also able to recognise target stimuli from novel distractors. These findings indicate that visual processing in bees is sufficiently accurate for recognising views of complex scenery as potential landmarks, which would enable bees flying in a forest to use trees both as landmark and/or odometric cues.

“…von Frisch, 1914;Baumgärtner, 1928;Hertz, 1929a;Hertz, 1929b;Hertz, 1931;Hertz, 1933;Hertz, 1935;Schnetter, 1968;Wehner, 1969;Cruse, 1972;Anderson, 1977;Srinivasan and Lehrer, 1988;Collett and Cartwright, 1983;Menzel and Lieke, 1983;Giger and Srinivasan, 1995;Giurfa et al, 1996a;Efler and Ronacher, 2000;Stach et al, 2004;Zhang et al, 2004;Dyer et al, 2005) (for reviews, see Wehner, 1972;Wehner, 1981). The early attempts were devoted to discover which particular features such as pattern border length, density, edge orientation or degree of disruptiveness could be discriminated by bees.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of patches of coloured discs by bees

Wertlen

Niggebrügge

Vorobyev

et al. 2008

SUMMARYTo find out how grouping of flowers into patches improves their detectability by hymenopteran pollinators, we trained honeybees and bumblebees to detect groups of three spatially separated disks and compared results with the detection limit for single disks. When the discs presented contrast to the long-wavelength-sensitive (L) receptor, grouping of disks improved the detectability. The disks were optically resolvable for the honeybee eye. The improvement of detectability was stronger for bumblebees than for honeybees. When disks did not present contrast to the L-receptor, the grouping did not improve the detectability, i.e. the detection limit was set by the size of a single disk. We conclude that in bees the neural mechanisms that improve detectability of grouped elements require input from the L-receptor. Our results indicate that grouping of flowers into sparse patches can improve their detectability by bees, even when individual flowers can be optically resolved by the eyes of bees, as long as flowers can be detected by the long-wavelength-sensitive receptor.