ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Symbolic representation of numerosity by honeybees ( Apis mellifera): matching characters to small quantities.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Brain areas for reversible symbolic reference, a potential singularity of the human brain.eLife · 2025Article
- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Article
- Association neurons in the crow telencephalon link visual signs to numerical values.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Does quantity matter to a stingless bee?Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Comparative psychophysics of colour preferences in two species of non-eusocial Australian native halictid bees.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2021Article
- Wild non-eusocial bees learn a colour discrimination task in response to simulated predation events.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2021Article
- Behavioral and Neuronal Representation of Numerosity Zero in the Crow.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Ants Can Anticipate the Following Quantity in an Arithmetic Sequence.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Different mechanisms underlie implicit visual statistical learning in honey bees and humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Bumblebees Use Sequential Scanning of Countable Items in Visual Patterns to Solve Numerosity Tasks.Integrative and comparative biology · 2020Article
- Reply to comment on HowardProceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Nothing to dance about: unclear evidence for symbolic representations and numerical competence in honeybees. A Comment on: Symbolic representation of numerosity by honeybees (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Studies in the Mentality of Literates: Searching for the Cultural Great Divide at the Individual Level of Analysis.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2020Article
- Symbolic representation of numerosity by honeybees ( Apis mellifera): matching characters to small quantities.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Achieving arithmetic learning in honeybees and examining how individuals learn.Communicative & integrative biology · 2019Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The assignment of a symbolic representation to a specific numerosity is a fundamental requirement for humans solving complex mathematical calculations used in diverse applications such as algebra, accounting, physics and everyday commerce. Here we show that honeybees are able to learn to match a sign to a numerosity, or a numerosity to a sign, and subsequently transfer this knowledge to novel numerosity stimuli changed in colour properties, shape and configuration. While honeybees learned the associations between two quantities (two; three) and two signs (N-shape; inverted T-shape), they failed at reversing their specific task of sign-to-numerosity matching to numerosity-to-sign matching and vice versa (i.e. a honeybee that learned to match a sign to a number of elements was not able to invert this learning to match the numerosity of elements to a sign). Thus, while bees could learn the association between a symbol and numerosity, it was linked to the specific task and bees could not spontaneously extrapolate the association to a novel, reversed task. Our study therefore reveals that the basic requirement for numerical symbolic representation can be fulfilled by an insect brain, suggesting that the absence of its spontaneous emergence in animals is not due to cognitive limitation.
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