Small Brains, Smart Minds: Vision, Perception and ‘Cognition’ in honeybees

Abstract

Recent work is beginning to reveal that insects may not be the simple, reflexive creatures that they were once assumed to be. Honeybees, for example, can learn rather general features of flowers and landmarks, such as colour, orientation and symmetry, and apply them to distinguish between objects that they have never previously encountered. Bees exhibit “top-down” processing: that is, they are capable of using prior knowledge to detect poorly visible or camouflaged objects. Furthermore, bees can learn to navigate through labyrinths, to form complex associations and to acquire abstract concepts such as “sameness” and “difference”. All of these observations suggest that there is no hard dichotomy between invertebrates and vertebrates in the context of perception, learning and ‘cognition’; and that brain size is not necessarily a reliable predictor of perceptual capacity.