Université de Toulouse, UPS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France.
J Exp Biol. 2010 Feb 15;213(4):593-601. doi: 10.1242/jeb.039263.
We studied whether honeybees can distinguish face-like configurations by using standardized stimuli commonly employed in primate and human visual research. Furthermore, we studied whether, irrespective of their capacity to distinguish between face-like stimuli, bees learn to classify visual stimuli built up of the same elements in face-like versus non-face-like categories. We showed that bees succeeded in discriminating both face-like and non-face-like stimuli and categorized appropriately novel stimuli in these two classes. To this end, they used configural information and not just isolated features or low-level cues. Bees looked for a specific configuration in which each feature had to be located in an appropriate spatial relationship with respect to the others, thus showing sensitivity for first-order relationships between features. Although faces are biologically irrelevant stimuli for bees, the fact that they were able to integrate visual features into complex representations suggests that face-like stimulus categorization can occur even in the absence of brain regions specialized in face processing.
我们研究了蜜蜂是否能够通过使用在灵长类动物和人类视觉研究中常用的标准化刺激来区分类似面部的形状。此外，我们还研究了蜜蜂是否能够在区分类似面部的刺激的能力之外，学会将由相同元素组成的视觉刺激分类为类似面部和非类似面部的类别。我们发现，蜜蜂成功地区分了类似面部和非类似面部的刺激，并适当地将新的刺激分类到这两个类别中。为此，它们使用了整体信息，而不仅仅是孤立的特征或低水平的线索。蜜蜂在寻找一种特定的配置，其中每个特征都必须以相对于其他特征的适当空间关系来定位，从而表现出对特征之间一阶关系的敏感性。尽管对于蜜蜂来说，面部是生物学上无关的刺激，但它们能够将视觉特征整合到复杂的表示中，这表明即使在缺乏专门处理面部的大脑区域的情况下，也可以对面部刺激进行分类。
