School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia.
Science. 2020 Feb 21;367(6480):910-912. doi: 10.1126/science.aay8064.
Many animals can associate object shapes with incentives. However, such behavior is possible without storing images of shapes in memory that are accessible to more than one sensory modality. One way to explore whether there are modality-independent internal representations of object shapes is to investigate cross-modal recognition-experiencing an object in one sensory modality and later recognizing it in another. We show that bumble bees trained to discriminate two differently shaped objects (cubes and spheres) using only touch (in darkness) or vision (in light, but barred from touching the objects) could subsequently discriminate those same objects using only the other sensory information. Our experiments demonstrate that bumble bees possess the ability to integrate sensory information in a way that requires modality-independent internal representations.
许多动物可以将物体形状与激励联系起来。然而，这种行为无需在记忆中存储可通过多种感觉模式访问的形状图像即可实现。探索是否存在与感觉模式无关的物体形状的内部表示形式的一种方法是研究跨感觉模式识别——在一种感觉模式中体验一个物体，然后在另一种感觉模式中识别它。我们表明，经过训练仅使用触摸（在黑暗中）或视觉（在光线下，但禁止触摸物体）来区分两种不同形状的物体（立方体和球体）的大黄蜂，随后可以仅使用其他感觉信息来区分这些相同的物体。我们的实验表明，大黄蜂具有以需要与感觉模式无关的内部表示形式整合感觉信息的能力。
