Kheradmand Bahram, Richardson-Ramos Ian, Chan Sarah, Nelson Claudia, Nieh James C
Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, MC0116, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Insects. 2025 Mar 31;16(4):358. doi: 10.3390/insects16040358.
Learning to anticipate upcoming events can increase fitness by allowing animals to choose the best course of action, and many species can learn sequences of events and anticipate rewards. To date, most studies have focused on sequences over short time scales such as a few seconds. Whereas events separated by a few seconds are easily learned, events separated by longer delays are typically more difficult to learn. Here, we show that honey bees () can learn a sequence of two visually distinct food sources alternating in profitability every few minutes. Bees were challenged to learn that the rewarded pattern was the one that was non-rewarded on the prior visit. We show that bees can predict and choose the feeder that will be rewarding upon their next approach more frequently than predicted by chance, and they improve with experience, with 64% correct choices made in the second half of their visit sequence ( = 320 visits by 20 different bees). These results increase our understanding of honey bee visual sequential learning and further demonstrate the flexibility of foragers' learning strategies.
学会预测即将发生的事件可以让动物选择最佳行动方案，从而提高适应性，许多物种都能学习事件序列并预测奖励。迄今为止，大多数研究都集中在短时间尺度（如几秒）的序列上。虽然间隔几秒的事件很容易学习，但间隔较长时间的事件通常更难学习。在这里，我们表明蜜蜂能够学习每隔几分钟交替出现一次、视觉上截然不同且盈利能力不同的两种食物源的序列。蜜蜂面临的挑战是要了解到奖励模式是前一次访问时未奖励的那种模式。我们表明，蜜蜂能够预测并选择在下一次接近时会有奖励的喂食器，且比随机预测的频率更高，并且它们会随着经验的增加而提高，在访问序列的后半段有64%的正确选择（20只不同的蜜蜂进行了320次访问）。这些结果增进了我们对蜜蜂视觉序列学习的理解，并进一步证明了觅食者学习策略的灵活性。
