School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2013 Jan;199(1):45-55. doi: 10.1007/s00359-012-0767-5. Epub 2012 Oct 18.
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) have remarkable visual learning and discrimination abilities that extend beyond learning simple colours, shapes or patterns. They can discriminate landscape scenes, types of flowers, and even human faces. This suggests that in spite of their small brain, honeybees have a highly developed capacity for processing complex visual information, comparable in many respects to vertebrates. Here, we investigated whether this capacity extends to complex images that humans distinguish on the basis of artistic style: Impressionist paintings by Monet and Cubist paintings by Picasso. We show that honeybees learned to simultaneously discriminate between five different Monet and Picasso paintings, and that they do not rely on luminance, colour, or spatial frequency information for discrimination. When presented with novel paintings of the same style, the bees even demonstrated some ability to generalize. This suggests that honeybees are able to discriminate Monet paintings from Picasso ones by extracting and learning the characteristic visual information inherent in each painting style. Our study further suggests that discrimination of artistic styles is not a higher cognitive function that is unique to humans, but simply due to the capacity of animals-from insects to humans-to extract and categorize the visual characteristics of complex images.
蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）具有出色的视觉学习和辨别能力，不仅可以学习简单的颜色、形状或图案，还可以辨别风景、花卉类型，甚至是人脸。这表明，尽管蜜蜂的大脑很小，但它们在处理复杂视觉信息方面具有高度发达的能力，在许多方面与脊椎动物相当。在这里，我们研究了这种能力是否扩展到了人类根据艺术风格区分的复杂图像：莫奈的印象派画作和毕加索的立体派画作。我们表明，蜜蜂学会了同时辨别五幅不同的莫奈和毕加索画作，并且它们不会依赖于亮度、颜色或空间频率信息进行辨别。当呈现具有相同风格的新画作时，蜜蜂甚至表现出一定的概括能力。这表明，蜜蜂能够通过提取和学习每种绘画风格固有的特征视觉信息来区分莫奈画作和毕加索画作。我们的研究进一步表明，对艺术风格的辨别并不是人类独有的高级认知功能，而是由于从昆虫到人类等动物都有能力提取和分类复杂图像的视觉特征。
