Journal
ANIMAL COGNITION
Volume 26, Issue 3, Pages 909-928Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s10071-022-01741-2
Keywords
Inter-individual variability; Insect cognition; Domain-general cognition; Domain-specific cognition; Cognitive repeatability; Honey bee
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study investigates the relationship between the honey bee's ability to learn a simple discrimination task and its ability to solve more complex tasks. The results indicate a significant positive correlation between the bees' performance in the simple discrimination task and their performance in both reversal learning and negative patterning tasks. This suggests that cognitive consistency is a distinct characteristic of bees across different learning paradigms, and further research is needed to determine if this is a common characteristic of insect brains.
The question of whether individuals perform consistently across a variety of cognitive tasks is relevant for studies of comparative cognition. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is an appropriate model to study cognitive consistency as its learning can be studied in multiple elemental and non-elemental learning tasks. We took advantage of this possibility and studied if the ability of honey bees to learn a simple discrimination correlates with their ability to solve two tasks of higher complexity, reversal learning and negative patterning. We performed four experiments in which we varied the sensory modality of the stimuli (visual or olfactory) and the type (Pavlovian or operant) and complexity (elemental or non-elemental) of conditioning to examine if stable correlated performances could be observed across experiments. Across all experiments, an individual's proficiency to learn the simple discrimination task was positively and significantly correlated with performance in both reversal learning and negative patterning, while the performances in reversal learning and negative patterning were positively, yet not significantly correlated. These results suggest that correlated performances across learning paradigms represent a distinct cognitive characteristic of bees. Further research is necessary to examine if individual cognitive consistency can be found in other insect species as a common characteristic of insect brains.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available