Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Université de Toulouse, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France.
Annu Rev Entomol. 2011;56:423-43. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ento-120709-144855.
Visual learning admits different levels of complexity, from the formation of a simple associative link between a visual stimulus and its outcome, to more sophisticated performances, such as object categorization or rules learning, that allow flexible responses beyond simple forms of learning. Not surprisingly, higher-order forms of visual learning have been studied primarily in vertebrates with larger brains, while simple visual learning has been the focus in animals with small brains such as insects. This dichotomy has recently changed as studies on visual learning in social insects have shown that these animals can master extremely sophisticated tasks. Here we review a spectrum of visual learning forms in social insects, from color and pattern learning, visual attention, and top-down image recognition, to interindividual recognition, conditional discrimination, category learning, and rule extraction. We analyze the necessity and sufficiency of simple associations to account for complex visual learning in Hymenoptera and discuss possible neural mechanisms underlying these visual performances.
视觉学习承认不同程度的复杂性，从视觉刺激与其结果之间形成简单的联想关系，到更复杂的表现形式，如物体分类或规则学习，这些都允许超出简单学习形式的灵活反应。毫不奇怪，更高阶的视觉学习主要在大脑较大的脊椎动物中进行研究，而简单的视觉学习则是大脑较小的动物（如昆虫）的研究重点。这种二分法最近发生了变化，因为对社会性昆虫的视觉学习研究表明，这些动物可以掌握极其复杂的任务。在这里，我们回顾了社会性昆虫中一系列的视觉学习形式，包括颜色和模式学习、视觉注意力、自上而下的图像识别，以及个体间识别、条件辨别、类别学习和规则提取。我们分析了简单联想对于膜翅目昆虫复杂视觉学习的必要性和充分性，并讨论了这些视觉表现背后可能的神经机制。
