Bumblebee visual search for multiple learned target types

Abstract

Visual search is well studied in human psychology, but we know comparatively little about similar capacities in non-human animals. It is sometimes assumed that animal visual search is restricted to a single target at a time. In bees, for example, this limitation has been evoked to explain flower constancy, the tendency of bees to specialise on a single flower type. Few studies, however, have investigated bee visual search for multiple target types after extended learning and controlling for prior visual experience. We trained colour-naive bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) extensively in separate discrimination tasks to recognise two rewarding colours in interspersed block training sessions. We then tested them with the two colours simultaneously in the presence of distracting colours to examine whether and how quickly they were able to switch between the target colours. We found that bees switched between visual targets quickly and often. The median time taken to switch between targets was shorter than known estimates of how long traces last in bees' working memory, suggesting that their capacity to recall more than one learned target was not restricted by working memory limitations. Following our results, we propose a model of memory and learning that integrates our findings with those of previous studies investigating flower constancy. © 2013. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.