Small Brains, Smart Minds: Vision, Perception and ‘Cognition’ in honeybees

Abstract

Recent work is beginning to reveal that insects may not be the simple, reflexive creatures that they were once assumed to be. Honeybees, for example, can learn rather general features of flowers and landmarks, such as colour, orientation and symmetry, and apply them to distinguish between objects that they have never previously encountered. Bees exhibit “top-down” processing: that is, they are capable of using prior knowledge to detect poorly visible or camouflaged objects. Furthermore, bees can learn to navigate through labyrinths, to form complex associations and to acquire abstract concepts such as “sameness” and “difference”. All of these observations suggest that there is no hard dichotomy between invertebrates and vertebrates in the context of perception, learning and ‘cognition’; and that brain size is not necessarily a reliable predictor of perceptual capacity.

Indexing terms:

• Honeybee
• Vision
• Perception
• Cognition
• Pattern recognition
• Associative recall
• Delayed match to sample
• Concept formation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mandyam Srinivasan

Mandyam V Srinivasan holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master's degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, and a DSc in Neuroethology from the Australian National University. He is presently Professor of Visual Sciences at the Australian National University's Research School of Biological Sciences and Director of the University's Centre for Visual Science. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Zürich. Last year he was awarded an Inaugural Australian Federation Fellowship. Srinivasan's research focuses on the principles of visual processing in simple natural systems,' and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.

Shaowu Zhang

S W Zhang studied applied mathematics at the University of Science and Technology of China and obtained a Diploma (eq. Master Degree) in 1964. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany recognised his research achievements during the 1970's and awarded him the AvH fellowship (postdoctoral level) in 1979. He was an Associate Professor in the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since 1991 he has been in the Centre for Visual Sciences, the Australian National University. Presently Zhang is a Fellow at the Australian National University's Research School of Biological Sciences.