ArticleScientific reports2023
Relational reasoning in wild bumblebees revisited: the role of distance.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Relational similarity in wild bumblebees: the role of spatial alignment complexity.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- The constructive nature of memories in insects: bumblebees as a case study.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
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Abstract
In reasoning tasks, non-human animals attend more to relational than to object similarity. It is precisely this focus on relational similarity that has been argued to explain the reasoning gap between humans and other animals. Work with humans has revealed that objects placed near each other are represented to be more similar than objects placed farther apart. Will distance between objects also affect non-human animals' abilities to represent and reason about objects? To test this, wild bumblebees were presented with a spatial reasoning task (with competing object matches) in which the objects or features alone (colour, shape) were placed close together or far apart. Bumblebees spontaneously attended to objects over relations, but only when the objects were far apart. Features alone were not strong enough to drive object matching-suggesting that bumblebees bound colour and shape into their object representations. These findings question whether the ability to focus on and compare objects is what makes human abstract reasoning unique.
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