Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Lab, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA), Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France.
Sci Adv. 2019 Feb 6;5(2):eaav0961. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aav0961. eCollection 2019 Feb.
Many animals understand numbers at a basic level for use in essential tasks such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management. However, complex arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, using symbols and/or labeling have only been demonstrated in a limited number of nonhuman vertebrates. We show that honeybees, with a miniature brain, can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction. In a free-flying environment, individual bees used this information to solve unfamiliar problems involving adding or subtracting one element from a group of elements. This display of numerosity requires bees to acquire long-term rules and use short-term working memory. Given that honeybees and humans are separated by over 400 million years of evolution, our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman animals than previously suspected.
许多动物在基本层面上理解数字，用于觅食、鱼群洄游和资源管理等重要任务。然而，只有在有限数量的非人类脊椎动物中才展示出了使用符号和/或标记进行复杂的算术运算，如加法和减法。我们表明，蜜蜂虽然大脑很小，但可以学会将蓝色和黄色用作表示加法或减法的符号。在自由飞行的环境中，个体蜜蜂使用这些信息来解决涉及从一组元素中添加或减去一个元素的不熟悉问题。这种数量表示需要蜜蜂获得长期规则并使用短期工作记忆。鉴于蜜蜂和人类在进化过程中已经分离了超过 4 亿年，我们的发现表明，高级数字认知可能比以前想象的更容易被非人类动物获得。
