Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Animal Comparative Economics Laboratory, Department of Zoology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany.
Anim Cogn. 2020 Nov;23(6):1119-1127. doi: 10.1007/s10071-020-01360-9. Epub 2020 Feb 19.
In a constantly changing environment, it is advantageous for animals to encode a location (such as a food source) relying on more than one single cue. A certain position might, in fact, be signalled by the presence of information acquired through different sensory modalities which may be integrated into cohesive memories. Here, we aimed to investigate multi-sensory learning capabilities and multi-modal information integration in Lasius niger ants. Individual ants were placed in a Y-maze where odour information always led to a food reward; moreover, arm and wall colour were also predictive but only when co-occurring with odour in a specific combination. At test, the odour cue was made uninformative (it was present in both arms). Ants were still able to correctly locate the reward by integrating odour with the right colour and side combination. In a second experiment, we tested whether multi-modal cue integration can take place in a single trial. To this end, ants were exposed to a rewarded odour in a single-arm maze and could experience the Y-maze (with all available cues) only once. At test (which was identical to that of Experiment 1), ants showed a slight preference for the correct colour-side combination, although not significantly different from chance level. Our results showed the capability of black garden ants to code apparently redundant contextual information and to create and rely on conditional relationships between the information available. We argue that future studies should deepen the inquiry on the timing and progression of multi-modal cue learning.
在不断变化的环境中，动物依靠多种单一线索来编码位置（如食物源）是有利的。实际上，一个特定的位置可能由通过不同感觉模式获得的信息存在来指示，这些信息可能被整合到有凝聚力的记忆中。在这里，我们旨在研究黑毛蚁的多感官学习能力和多模态信息整合。将单个蚂蚁放置在 Y 型迷宫中，气味信息总是指向食物奖励；此外，手臂和墙壁的颜色也是可预测的，但只有在与气味以特定组合同时出现时才是可预测的。在测试中，气味线索变得没有信息（在两个臂中都存在）。蚂蚁仍然能够通过将气味与正确的颜色和侧面组合结合起来正确定位奖励。在第二个实验中，我们测试了多模态线索整合是否可以在单次试验中进行。为此，蚂蚁在单臂迷宫中接触到有奖励的气味，并且只能一次性体验 Y 型迷宫（具有所有可用线索）。在测试中（与实验 1 相同），蚂蚁对正确的颜色-侧面组合表现出轻微的偏好，尽管与随机水平没有显著差异。我们的结果表明，黑毛蚁有能力对明显冗余的上下文信息进行编码，并在可用信息之间创建和依赖条件关系。我们认为，未来的研究应该深入探究多模态线索学习的时间和进展。
