ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology2020
Bumblebees Use Sequential Scanning of Countable Items in Visual Patterns to Solve Numerosity Tasks.
Article in Integrative and comparative biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Article
- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Article
- How honey bees make fast and accurate decisions.eLife · 2023Article
- Prior associations affect bumblebees' generalization performance in a tool-selection task.iScience · 2022Article
- An insect brain organizes numbers on a left-to-right mental number line.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- Does quantity matter to a stingless bee?Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Illusional Perspective across Humans and Bees.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Continuous versus discrete quantity discrimination in dune snail (Mollusca: Gastropoda) seeking thermal refuges.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Approach Direction Prior to Landing Explains Patterns of Colour Learning in Bees.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
- Numerosities and Other Magnitudes in the Brains: A Comparative View.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Honeybees solve a multi-comparison ranking task by probability matching.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most research in comparative cognition focuses on measuring if animals manage certain tasks; fewer studies explore how animals might solve them. We investigated bumblebees' scanning strategies in a numerosity task, distinguishing patterns with two items from four and one from three, and subsequently transferring numerical information to novel numbers, shapes, and colors. Video analyses of flight paths indicate that bees do not determine the number of items by using a rapid assessment of number (as mammals do in "subitizing"); instead, they rely on sequential enumeration even when items are presented simultaneously and in small quantities. This process, equivalent to the motor tagging ("pointing") found for large number tasks in some primates, results in longer scanning times for patterns containing larger numbers of items. Bees used a highly accurate working memory, remembering which items have already been scanned, resulting in fewer than 1% of re-inspections of items before making a decision. Our results indicate that the small brain of bees, with less parallel processing capacity than mammals, might constrain them to use sequential pattern evaluation even for low quantities.
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