Zhang Shaowu, Si Aung, Pahl Mario
Centre of Excellence in Vision Science, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Front Neurosci. 2012 Jun 18;6:88. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00088. eCollection 2012.
Honeybees can easily be trained to perform different types of discrimination tasks under controlled laboratory conditions. This review describes a range of experiments carried out with free-flying forager honeybees under such conditions. The research done over the past 30 or so years suggests that cognitive abilities (learning and perception) in insects are more intricate and flexible than was originally imagined. It has become apparent that honeybees are capable of a variety of visually guided tasks, involving decision making under challenging situations: this includes simultaneously making use of different sensory modalities, such as vision and olfaction, and learning to use abstract concepts such as "sameness" and "difference." Many studies have shown that decision making in foraging honeybees is highly flexible. The trained animals learn how to solve a task, and do so with a high accuracy, but when they are presented with a new variation of the task, they apply the learnt rules from the earlier setup to the new situation, and solve the new task as well. Honeybees therefore not only feature a rich behavioral repertoire to choose from, but also make decisions most apt to the current situation. The experiments in this review give an insight into the environmental cues and cognitive resources that are probably highly significant for a forager bee that must continually make decisions regarding patches of resources to be exploited.
在可控的实验室条件下，蜜蜂很容易被训练去执行不同类型的辨别任务。这篇综述描述了在此类条件下对自由飞行的觅食蜜蜂进行的一系列实验。过去30年左右的研究表明，昆虫的认知能力（学习和感知）比最初想象的更为复杂和灵活。很明显，蜜蜂能够执行各种视觉引导任务，包括在具有挑战性的情况下做出决策：这包括同时利用不同的感官模式，如视觉和嗅觉，并学习使用诸如“相同”和“不同”等抽象概念。许多研究表明，觅食蜜蜂的决策非常灵活。经过训练的蜜蜂学会如何解决一项任务，并且能高精度地完成，但当给它们呈现该任务的新变体时，它们会将从先前设置中学到的规则应用于新情况，并同样解决新任务。因此，蜜蜂不仅拥有丰富多样的行为可供选择，还能做出最适合当前情况的决策。本综述中的实验深入探讨了环境线索和认知资源，这些对于一只必须不断就待开发的资源斑块做出决策的觅食蜜蜂可能具有高度重要性。
