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Howard SR, Dyer AG. Quantity misperception by hymenopteran insects observing the solitaire illusion. iScience 2024; 27:108697. [PMID: 38288356 PMCID: PMC10823103 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108697] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/03/2023] [Revised: 10/30/2023] [Accepted: 12/06/2023] [Indexed: 01/31/2024] Open
Abstract
Visual illusions are errors in signal perception and inform us about the visual and cognitive processes of different animals. Invertebrates are relatively less studied for their illusionary perception, despite the insight that comparative data provides on the evolution of common perceptual mechanisms. The Solitaire Illusion is a numerosity illusion where a viewer typically misperceives the relative quantities of two items of different colors consisting of identical quantity, with more centrally clustered items appearing more numerous. We trained European honeybees (Apis mellifera) and European wasps (Vespula vulgaris) to select stimuli containing a higher quantity of yellow dots in arrays of blue and yellow dots and then presented them with the Solitaire Illusion. Insects learnt to discriminate between dot quantities and showed evidence of perceiving the Solitaire Illusion. Further work should determine whether the illusion is caused by numerical cues only or by both quantity and non-numerical spatial cues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Scarlett R. Howard
- School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
| | - Adrian G. Dyer
- Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
- Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology (iDN), Johannes Gutenberg University, 55122 Mainz, Germany
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Reznikova Z. Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication. Animals (Basel) 2023; 13:ani13071174. [PMID: 37048430 PMCID: PMC10093743 DOI: 10.3390/ani13071174] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/27/2023] [Revised: 03/15/2023] [Accepted: 03/24/2023] [Indexed: 03/29/2023] Open
Abstract
Over the last 40–50 years, ethology has become increasingly quantitative and computational. However, when analysing animal behavioural sequences, researchers often need help finding an adequate model to assess certain characteristics of these sequences while using a relatively small number of parameters. In this review, I demonstrate that the information theory approaches based on Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity can furnish effective tools to analyse and compare animal natural behaviours. In addition to a comparative analysis of stereotypic behavioural sequences, information theory can provide ideas for particular experiments on sophisticated animal communications. In particular, it has made it possible to discover the existence of a developed symbolic “language” in leader-scouting ant species based on the ability of these ants to transfer abstract information about remote events.
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Howard SR, Greentree J, Avarguès-Weber A, Garcia JE, Greentree AD, Dyer AG. Numerosity Categorization by Parity in an Insect and Simple Neural Network. Front Ecol Evol 2022. [DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2022.805385] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
A frequent question as technology improves and becomes increasingly complex, is how we enable technological solutions and models inspired by biological systems. Creating technology based on humans is challenging and costly as human brains and cognition are complex. The honeybee has emerged as a valuable comparative model which exhibits some cognitive-like behaviors. The relative simplicity of the bee brain compared to large mammalian brains enables learning tasks, such as categorization, that can be mimicked by simple neural networks. Categorization of abstract concepts can be essential to how we understand complex information. Odd and even numerical processing is known as a parity task in human mathematical representations, but there appears to be a complete absence of research exploring parity processing in non-human animals. We show that free-flying honeybees can visually acquire the capacity to differentiate between odd and even quantities of 1–10 geometric elements and extrapolate this categorization to the novel numerosities of 11 and 12, revealing that such categorization is accessible to a comparatively simple system. We use this information to construct a neural network consisting of five neurons that can reliably categorize odd and even numerosities up to 40 elements. While the simple neural network is not directly based on the biology of the honeybee brain, it was created to determine if simple systems can replicate the parity categorization results we observed in honeybees. This study thus demonstrates that a task, previously only shown in humans, is accessible to a brain with a comparatively small numbers of neurons. We discuss the possible mechanisms or learning processes allowing bees to perform this categorization task, which range from numeric explanations, such as counting, to pairing elements and memorization of stimuli or patterns. The findings should encourage further testing of parity processing in a wider variety of animals to inform on its potential biological roots, evolutionary drivers, and potential technology innovations for concept processing.
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Howard SR, Dyer AG, Garcia JE, Giurfa M, Reser DH, Rosa MGP, Avarguès-Weber A. Naïve and Experienced Honeybee Foragers Learn Normally Configured Flowers More Easily Than Non-configured or Highly Contrasted Flowers. Front Ecol Evol 2021. [DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2021.662336] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Angiosperms have evolved to attract and/or deter specific pollinators. Flowers provide signals and cues such as scent, colour, size, pattern, and shape, which allow certain pollinators to more easily find and visit the same type of flower. Over evolutionary time, bees and angiosperms have co-evolved resulting in flowers being more attractive to bee vision and preferences, and allowing bees to recognise specific flower traits to make decisions on where to forage. Here we tested whether bees are instinctively tuned to process flower shape by training both flower-experienced and flower-naïve honeybee foragers to discriminate between pictures of two different flower species when images were either normally configured flowers or flowers which were scrambled in terms of spatial configuration. We also tested whether increasing picture contrast, to make flower features more salient, would improve or impair performance. We used four flower conditions: (i) normally configured greyscale flower pictures, (ii) scrambled flower configurations, (iii) high contrast normally configured flowers, and (iv) asymmetrically scrambled flowers. While all flower pictures contained very similar spatial information, both experienced and naïve bees were better able to learn to discriminate between normally configured flowers than between any of the modified versions. Our results suggest that a specialisation in flower recognition in bees is due to a combination of hard-wired neural circuitry and experience-dependent factors.
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Toh YP, Dion E, Monteiro A. Dissections of Larval, Pupal and Adult Butterfly Brains for Immunostaining and Molecular Analysis. Methods Protoc 2021; 4:53. [PMID: 34449688 PMCID: PMC8395752 DOI: 10.3390/mps4030053] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/08/2021] [Revised: 07/28/2021] [Accepted: 07/31/2021] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Butterflies possess impressive cognitive abilities, and investigations into the neural mechanisms underlying these abilities are increasingly being conducted. Exploring butterfly neurobiology may require the isolation of larval, pupal, and/or adult brains for further molecular and histological experiments. This procedure has been largely described in the fruit fly, but a detailed description of butterfly brain dissections is still lacking. Here, we provide a detailed written and video protocol for the removal of Bicyclus anynana adult, pupal, and larval brains. This species is gradually becoming a popular model because it uses a large set of sensory modalities, displays plastic and hormonally controlled courtship behaviour, and learns visual mate preference and olfactory preferences that can be passed on to its offspring. The extracted brain can be used for downstream analyses, such as immunostaining, DNA or RNA extraction, and the procedure can be easily adapted to other lepidopteran species and life stages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yi Peng Toh
- Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543, Singapore; (Y.P.T.); (A.M.)
| | - Emilie Dion
- Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543, Singapore; (Y.P.T.); (A.M.)
| | - Antónia Monteiro
- Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543, Singapore; (Y.P.T.); (A.M.)
- Yale-NUS College, 10 College Avenue West, Singapore 138609, Singapore
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Howard SR. Wild non-eusocial bees learn a colour discrimination task in response to simulated predation events. Naturwissenschaften 2021; 108:28. [PMID: 34152477 DOI: 10.1007/s00114-021-01739-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/23/2021] [Revised: 04/06/2021] [Accepted: 05/31/2021] [Indexed: 02/08/2023]
Abstract
Despite representing the majority of bee species, non-eusocial bees (e.g. solitary, subsocial, semisocial, and quasisocial species) are comparatively understudied in learning, memory, and cognitive-like behaviour compared to eusocial bees, such as honeybees and bumblebees. Ecologically relevant colour discrimination tasks are well-studied in eusocial bees, and research has shown that a few non-eusocial bee species are also capable of colour learning and long-term memory retention. Australia hosts over 2000 native bee species, most of which are non-eusocial, yet evidence of cognitive-like behaviour and learning abilities under controlled testing conditions is lacking. In the current study, I examine the learning ability of a non-eusocial Australian bee, Lasioglossum (Chilalictus) lanarium, using aversive differential conditioning during a colour discrimination task. L. lanarium learnt to discriminate between salient blue- and yellow-coloured stimuli following training with simulated predation events. This study acts as a bridge between cognitive studies on eusocial and non-social bees and introduces a framework for testing non-eusocial wild bees on elemental visual learning tasks using aversive conditioning. Non-eusocial bee species are far more numerous than eusocial species and contribute to agriculture, economics, and ecosystem services in Australia and across the globe. Thus, it is important to study their capacity to learn flower traits allowing for successful foraging and pollination events, thereby permitting us a better understanding of their role in plant-pollinator interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Scarlett R Howard
- Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia.
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Ants Can Anticipate the Following Quantity in an Arithmetic Sequence. Behav Sci (Basel) 2021; 11:bs11020018. [PMID: 33525422 PMCID: PMC7911458 DOI: 10.3390/bs11020018] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/23/2020] [Revised: 12/28/2020] [Accepted: 01/21/2021] [Indexed: 11/23/2022] Open
Abstract
Workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti have been previously shown to be able to add and subtract numbers of elements and to expect the time and location of the next food delivery. We wanted to know if they could anticipate the following quantity of elements present near their food when the number of these elements increases or decreases over time according to an arithmetic sequence. Two experiments were therefore carried out, one with an increasing sequence, the other with a decreasing sequence. Each experiment consisted of two steps, one for the ants to learn the numbers of elements successively present near their food, the other to test their choice when they were simultaneously in the presence of the numbers from a previously learned sequence and the following quantity. The ants anticipated the following quantity in each presented numerical sequence. This forethinking of the next quantity applies to numerosity, thus, to concrete items. This anticipatory behavior may be explained by associative learning and by the ants’ ability to memorize events and to estimate the elapsing time.
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Howard SR, Schramme J, Garcia JE, Ng L, Avarguès-Weber A, Greentree AD, Dyer AG. Spontaneous quantity discrimination of artificial flowers by foraging honeybees. J Exp Biol 2020; 223:223/9/jeb223610. [DOI: 10.1242/jeb.223610] [Citation(s) in RCA: 16] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/16/2020] [Accepted: 04/07/2020] [Indexed: 11/20/2022]
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Many animals need to process numerical and quantity information in order to survive. Spontaneous quantity discrimination allows differentiation between two or more quantities without reinforcement or prior training on any numerical task. It is useful for assessing food resources, aggressive interactions, predator avoidance and prey choice. Honeybees have previously demonstrated landmark counting, quantity matching, use of numerical rules, quantity discrimination and arithmetic, but have not been tested for spontaneous quantity discrimination. In bees, spontaneous quantity discrimination could be useful when assessing the quantity of flowers available in a patch and thus maximizing foraging efficiency. In the current study, we assessed the spontaneous quantity discrimination behaviour of honeybees. Bees were trained to associate a single yellow artificial flower with sucrose. Bees were then tested for their ability to discriminate between 13 different quantity comparisons of artificial flowers (numeric ratio range: 0.08–0.8). Bees significantly preferred the higher quantity only in comparisons where ‘1’ was the lower quantity and where there was a sufficient magnitudinal distance between quantities (e.g. 1 versus 12, 1 versus 4, and 1 versus 3 but not 1 versus 2). Our results suggest a possible evolutionary benefit to choosing a foraging patch with a higher quantity of flowers when resources are scarce.
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Affiliation(s)
- Scarlett R. Howard
- Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia
- Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse 31000, France
| | - Jürgen Schramme
- Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology (iDN), Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz 55122, Germany
| | - Jair E. Garcia
- Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Lab, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia
| | - Leslie Ng
- School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3052, Australia
| | - Aurore Avarguès-Weber
- Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse 31000, France
| | - Andrew D. Greentree
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia
| | - Adrian G. Dyer
- Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Lab, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia
- Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
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Howard SR, Avarguès-Weber A, Garcia JE, Greentree AD, Dyer AG. Reply to comment on Howard et al. (2019): 'Nothing to dance about: unclear evidence for symbolic representations and numerical competence in honeybees'. Proc Biol Sci 2020; 287:20200095. [PMID: 32290798 PMCID: PMC7211442 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0095] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/15/2020] [Accepted: 03/20/2020] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Affiliation(s)
- Scarlett R. Howard
- Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France
- Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Laboratory, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia
| | - Aurore Avarguès-Weber
- Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France
| | - Jair E. Garcia
- Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Laboratory, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
| | - Andrew D. Greentree
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
| | - Adrian G. Dyer
- Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Laboratory, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
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Scheiner R, Frantzmann F, Jäger M, Mitesser O, Helfrich-Förster C, Pauls D. A Novel Thermal-Visual Place Learning Paradigm for Honeybees ( Apis mellifera). Front Behav Neurosci 2020; 14:56. [PMID: 32351370 PMCID: PMC7174502 DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00056] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/29/2020] [Accepted: 03/24/2020] [Indexed: 12/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) have fascinating navigational skills and learning capabilities in the field. To decipher the mechanisms underlying place learning in honeybees, we need paradigms to study place learning of individual honeybees under controlled laboratory conditions. Here, we present a novel visual place learning arena for honeybees which relies on high temperatures as aversive stimuli. Honeybees learn to locate a safe spot in an unpleasantly warm arena, relying on a visual panorama. Bees can solve this task at a temperature of 46°C, while at temperatures above 48°C bees die quickly. This new paradigm, which is based on pioneering work on Drosophila, allows us now to investigate thermal-visual place learning of individual honeybees in the laboratory, for example after controlled genetic knockout or pharmacological intervention.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ricarda Scheiner
- Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology, Theodor-Boveri-Institute, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Felix Frantzmann
- Department of Animal Physiology, Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
- Neurobiology and Genetics, Theodor-Boveri-Institute, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Maria Jäger
- Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology, Theodor-Boveri-Institute, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Oliver Mitesser
- Field Station Fabrikschleichach, Biocenter, Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Charlotte Helfrich-Förster
- Neurobiology and Genetics, Theodor-Boveri-Institute, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
| | - Dennis Pauls
- Department of Animal Physiology, Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
- Neurobiology and Genetics, Theodor-Boveri-Institute, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
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