Zhang Shaowu, Srinivasan Mandyam V, Zhu Hong, Wong Jason
Centre for Visual Sciences, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
J Exp Biol. 2004 Sep;207(Pt 19):3289-98. doi: 10.1242/jeb.01155.
Recent work has revealed that monkeys as well as pigeons are able to categorise complex visual objects. We show here that the ability to group similar, natural, visual images together extends to an invertebrate - the honeybee. Bees can be trained to distinguish between different types of naturally occurring scenes in a rather general way, and to group them into four distinct categories: landscapes, plant stems and two different kinds of flowers. They exhibit the same response to novel visual objects that differ greatly in their individual, low-level features, but belong to one of the four categories. We exclude the possibility that they might be using single, low-level features as a cue to categorise these natural visual images and suggest that the categorisation is based on a combination of low-level features and configurational cues.
近期的研究表明，猴子和鸽子都能够对复杂的视觉对象进行分类。我们在此展示，将相似的自然视觉图像归为一组的能力也存在于一种无脊椎动物——蜜蜂身上。蜜蜂能够接受训练，以一种相当宽泛的方式区分不同类型的自然场景，并将它们分为四个不同的类别：风景、植物茎干以及两种不同的花朵。对于新颖的视觉对象，尽管它们在个体的低层次特征上差异很大，但只要属于这四个类别之一，蜜蜂就会表现出相同的反应。我们排除了蜜蜂可能利用单一的低层次特征作为对这些自然视觉图像进行分类线索的可能性，并认为这种分类是基于低层次特征和结构线索的组合。
