Apprentissages visuels chez l'abeille Apis mellifera : de la généralisation à l'extraction de règles
Year: 2007
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This work presents different kind of visual learning with increasing cognitive requirements in free-flying honeybees Apis mellifera, from color generalization to rules extraction. We first study color generalization in bees trained to two rewarding colors, and we observe that their performances are consistent with a linear summation of the two generalization gradients generated by two trained colors. These gradients are asymmetric as control bees respond to the test stimuli as if these belong to different similarity classes in spite of having similar perceptual distances separating them. Our results suggest that color categories could exist in honeybees. Therefore, in a second study we show that bees can master a color categorization task. Bees treat bluish and yellowish stimuli as belonging to different classes. In a third study, we show that bees trained with complex achromatic patterns sharing a common layout comprising four edge orientations remember these orientations simultaneously in their appropriate positions. Moreover, we show that bees can use this kind of representation to categorize novel stimuli, and that stimulation of the achromatic L-photoreceptor is necessary for this task. In the last study, we asked whether bees could solve a transitive inference problem. We find that bees do not establish transitive inferences but, rather, guide their choices by the joint action of a recency effect and the associative strength of the stimuli. This all work contributes to a better comprehension of the visual cognitive abilities in insects and to determine precisely the abilities of the small bee brain to situate cognitive research into an appropriate comparative frame.
Author: Julie Bénard
Language: French
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W188555722