ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
Brain size predicts learning abilities in bees.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- When a bigger brain is better: The case of bee olfactory learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- What maintains variation in flower accessibility to pollinators in plant communities? A simulation study.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Pollinator cognition in a plant network.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Brain energy metabolism as an underlying basis of slow and fast cognitive phenotypes in honeybees.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Why birds are smart.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Brain size predicts bees' tolerance to urban environments.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Differentiation of workers into soldiers is associated with a size reduction of higher-order brain centers in the neotropical termite Procornitermes araujoi.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Can sociality facilitate learning of complex tasks? Lessons from bees and flowers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The decision-making process of leafcutting bees when selecting patches.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Brain size predicts learning abilities in bees.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Is foraging innovation lost following colonization of a less variable environment? A case study in surface- vs. cave-dwellingEcology and evolution · 2020Article
- Cognitive tasks could be biased towards generalists: a lesson from wild non-eusocial bees.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When it comes to the brain, bigger is generally considered better in terms of cognitive performance. While this notion is supported by studies of birds and primates showing that larger brains improve learning capacity, similar evidence is surprisingly lacking for invertebrates. Although the brain of invertebrates is smaller and simpler than that of vertebrates, recent work in insects has revealed enormous variation in size across species. Here, we ask whether bee species that have larger brains also have higher learning abilities. We conducted an experiment in which field-collected individuals had to associate an unconditioned stimulus (sucrose) with a conditioned stimulus (coloured strip). We found that most species can learn to associate a colour with a reward, yet some do so better than others. These differences in learning were related to brain size: species with larger brains-both absolute and relative to body size-exhibited enhanced performance to learn the reward-colour association. Our finding highlights the functional significance of brain size in insects, filling a major gap in our understanding of brain evolution and opening new opportunities for future research.
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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.