Stach Silke, Giurfa Martin
Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, CNRS-Université Paul Sabatier (UMR 5169), 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex 04, France.
Behav Brain Res. 2005 Jun 3;161(1):8-17. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2005.02.008. Epub 2005 Mar 16.
Generalization is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows treating similar stimuli as equivalents, and thus responding to them in the same manner. Here, we show that after training free-flying bees with a single, constant pair of patterns made of four quadrants, each displaying different oriented gratings, bees extract the orientation information corresponding to each quadrant and integrate it in a generic layout that preserved the spatial relationship between oriented edges. Our results show that the amount of experience with the training patterns is critical to determine or not generalization to novel stimuli sharing the layout of the rewarded stimulus. Increasing experience results in higher generalization levels reflected in significant responding to novel stimuli. With ongoing training, redundant information seems to be eliminated and reduced to the minimum that is necessary and sufficient to solve the task. Controlling precisely the level of experience of individuals is therefore crucial in experiments on visual recognition.
泛化是一种基本的认知能力，它允许将相似的刺激视为等同物，并因此以相同的方式对它们做出反应。在这里，我们表明，在用由四个象限组成的单一、固定的图案对自由飞行的蜜蜂进行训练后，每个象限显示不同方向的光栅，蜜蜂提取与每个象限相对应的方向信息，并将其整合到一个通用布局中，该布局保留了定向边缘之间的空间关系。我们的结果表明，对训练图案的经验量对于确定是否能泛化到与奖励刺激布局相同的新刺激至关重要。经验的增加会导致更高的泛化水平，表现为对新刺激有显著反应。随着持续训练，冗余信息似乎被消除，并减少到解决任务所需的最低限度。因此，在视觉识别实验中，精确控制个体的经验水平至关重要。
