ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bees flexibly adjust decision strategies to information content in a foraging task.Science advances · 2026Article
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- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Looks like home: numerosity, but not spatial frequency guides preference in zebrafish larvae (Danio rerio).Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Disparate processing of numerosity and associated continuous magnitudes in rats.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Numerical discrimination in Drosophila melanogaster.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Judgement bias may be explained by shifts in stimulus response curves.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- 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
- Illusional Perspective across Humans and Bees.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Numerosity tuning in human association cortices and local image contrast representations in early visual cortex.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Archerfish number discrimination.eLife · 2022Article
- Numerosities and Other Magnitudes in the Brains: A Comparative View.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We examined how bees solve a visual discrimination task with stimuli commonly used in numerical cognition studies. Bees performed well on the task, but additional tests showed that they had learned continuous (non-numerical) cues. A network model using biologically plausible visual feature filtering and a simple associative rule was capable of learning the task using only continuous cues inherent in the training stimuli, with no numerical processing. This model was also able to reproduce behaviours that have been considered in other studies indicative of numerical cognition. Our results support the idea that a sense of magnitude may be more primitive and basic than a sense of number. Our findings highlight how problematic inadvertent continuous cues can be for studies of numerical cognition. This remains a deep issue within the field that requires increased vigilance and cleverness from the experimenter. We suggest ways of better assessing numerical cognition in non-speaking animals, including assessing the use of all alternative cues in one test, using cross-modal cues, analysing behavioural responses to detect underlying strategies, and finding the neural substrate.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.