Exploring cognition in miniature brains: from concepts, numbers and awareness in honey bees

Despite having a 1mm3 brain, bees achieve remarkable cognitive feats, which include category and concept learning. They are also capable of numerosity judgments, which include a concept of zero and numerical-distance and numerical-size effects. In a novel exploration of their numeric capacities, we focused on the SNARC effect and showed that bees order numbers from left to right according to their magnitude and that the location of a number on that line varies with the reference number previously trained. Thus, this form of numeric representation is common to nervous system with distant evolutionary origins. The numeric sense of bees has, however some limitations that make it different from that of humans. Symbolic matching experiments in which different groups of bees were trained to match a sign (N or T) to a given numerosity (2 or 3) or vice versa revealed that learning the association was possible although reversing it (i.e. from number-to-sign if trained on sign-to-number, and vice versa) was not possible. This failure reveals a limitation in the symbolic representation of numbers in these insects.  

Finally, I will provide results comparing the bees' performance under delay vs. trace conditioning protocols, which in humans have been coupled to the use of distractors to determine whether awareness of the relationship between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and a distant unconditioned stimulus (US) is necessary for learning to occur. Our results show that, like in humans, providing distractors during delay conditioning has no effect on learning and memory formation. However, when the same distractors are provided during trace conditioning, i.e. when the CS and the US are separated by a gap, learning fails, thus showing the necessity of awareness for building the CS-US relationship in this learning form. 

Overall, these results indicate that a miniature brain is not a limitation for mediating relevant cognitive traits such as concept formation, numerosity and awareness. Current investigations focus on uncovering the neural solutions implemented by bees to achieve these performances to determine similarity and differences with the neural architectures existing in vertebrates. This comparative approach will provide crucial insights to understand the evolutionary origins of cognitive skills.

Le Colloquium du DEC est l'événement incontournable de notre département. Il accueille chaque mois des conférences données par des expert.e.s de renommée mondiale dans divers domaines des sciences cognitives tels que les neurosciences, la psychologie, la linguistique, la philosophie et l'anthropologie.

Programme 2024-2025