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Strang C, Muth F. Judgement bias may be explained by shifts in stimulus response curves. ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE 2023; 10:221322. [PMID: 37035286 PMCID: PMC10073905 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.221322] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/13/2022] [Accepted: 03/20/2023] [Indexed: 06/19/2023]
Abstract
Judgement bias, or 'optimism' and 'pessimism', has been demonstrated across many taxa, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying this behaviour remain unclear. In an optimism paradigm, animals are trained to an association, and, if given a positive experience, behave more favourably towards 'ambiguous' stimuli. We tested whether this effect could be explained by changes to stimulus response gradients by giving bees a task where their response was tested across a wider gradient of stimuli than typically tested. In line with previous work, we found that bees given a positive experience demonstrated judgement bias, being more likely to visit ambiguous stimuli. However, bees were also less likely to visit a stimulus on the other side of the rewarded stimulus (S+), and as such had a shifted stimulus response curve, showing a diminished peak shift response. In two follow-up experiments we tested the hypothesis that our manipulation altered bees' stimulus response curves via changes to the peak shift response by reducing peak shift in controls. We found that, in support of our hypothesis, elimination of peak shift also eliminated differences between treatments. Our results point towards a cognitive explanation of 'optimistic' behaviour in non-human animals and offer a new paradigm for considering emotion-like states.
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Affiliation(s)
- Caroline Strang
- Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
- School of Behavioural and Social Sciences, Brescia University College, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H2
| | - Felicity Muth
- Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
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2
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Young AM, Dyer FC. Past experience with spatial or temporal resource unpredictability shapes exploration in honey bees, Apis mellifera. Anim Behav 2022. [DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.09.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
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3
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Chatterjee A, Bais D, Brockmann A, Ramesh D. Search Behavior of Individual Foragers Involves Neurotransmitter Systems Characteristic for Social Scouting. FRONTIERS IN INSECT SCIENCE 2021; 1:664978. [PMID: 38468879 PMCID: PMC10926421 DOI: 10.3389/finsc.2021.664978] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2021] [Accepted: 05/10/2021] [Indexed: 03/13/2024]
Abstract
In honey bees search behavior occurs as social and solitary behavior. In the context of foraging, searching for food sources is performed by behavioral specialized foragers, the scouts. When the scouts have found a new food source, they recruit other foragers (recruits). These recruits never search for a new food source on their own. However, when the food source is experimentally removed, they start searching for that food source. Our study provides a detailed description of this solitary search behavior and the variation of this behavior among individual foragers. Furthermore, mass spectrometric measurement showed that the initiation and performance of this solitary search behavior is associated with changes in glutamate, GABA, histamine, aspartate, and the catecholaminergic system in the optic lobes and central brain area. These findings strikingly correspond with the results of an earlier study that showed that scouts and recruits differ in the expression of glutamate and GABA receptors. Together, the results of both studies provide first clear support for the hypothesis that behavioral specialization in honey bees is based on adjusting modulatory systems involved in solitary behavior to increase the probability or frequency of that behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Arumoy Chatterjee
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
- School of Chemical and Biotechnology, SASTRA University, Thanjavur, India
| | - Deepika Bais
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
| | - Axel Brockmann
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
| | - Divya Ramesh
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
- Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
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4
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Incorvaia DC, Hintze A, Dyer FC. Spatial allocation without spatial recruitment in bumblebees. Behav Ecol 2021. [DOI: 10.1093/beheco/araa125] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Abstract
Any foraging animal is expected to allocate its efforts among resource patches that vary in quality across time and space. For social insects, this problem is shifted to the colony level: the task of allocating foraging workers to the best patches currently available. To deal with this task, honeybees rely upon differential recruitment via the dance language, while some ants use differential recruitment on odor trails. Bumblebees, close relatives of honeybees, should also benefit from optimizing spatial allocation but lack any targeted recruitment system. How bumblebees solve this problem is thus of immense interest to evolutionary biologists studying collective behavior. It has been thought that bumblebees could solve the spatial allocation problem by relying on the summed individual decisions of foragers, who occasionally sample and shift to alternative resources. We use field experiments to test the hypothesis that bumblebees augment individual exploration with social information. Specifically, we provide behavioral evidence that, when higher-concentration sucrose arrives at the nest, employed foragers abandon their patches to begin searching for the better option; they are more likely to accept novel resources if they match the quality of the sucrose solution experienced in the nest. We explored this strategy further by building an agent-based model of bumblebee foraging. This model supports the hypothesis that using social information to inform search decisions is advantageous over individual search alone. Our results show that bumblebees use a collective foraging strategy built on social modulation of individual decisions, providing further insight into the evolution of collective behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Darren C Incorvaia
- Department of Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
- BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
| | - Arend Hintze
- BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
- Department for Complex Dynamical Systems and MicroData Analytics, Dalarna University, Högskolegatan, Falun, Sweden
| | - Fred C Dyer
- Department of Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
- BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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5
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Adaptive tuning of the exploitation-exploration trade-off in four honey bee species. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 2021. [DOI: 10.1007/s00265-020-02938-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/22/2022]
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Bidari S, Peleg O, Kilpatrick ZP. Social inhibition maintains adaptivity and consensus of honeybees foraging in dynamic environments. ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE 2019; 6:191681. [PMID: 31903216 PMCID: PMC6936270 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.191681] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/24/2019] [Accepted: 11/13/2019] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. Individuals foraging in groups act based on both their private observations and the opinions of their neighbours. How do these information sources interact in changing environments? We address this problem in the context of honeybee colonies whose inhibitory social interactions promote adaptivity and consensus needed for effective foraging. Individual and social interactions within a mathematical model of collective decisions shape the nutrition yield of a group foraging from feeders with temporally switching quality. Social interactions improve foraging from a single feeder if temporal switching is fast or feeder quality is low. When the colony chooses from multiple feeders, the most beneficial form of social interaction is direct switching, whereby bees flip the opinion of nest-mates foraging at lower-yielding feeders. Model linearization shows that effective social interactions increase the fraction of the colony at the correct feeder (consensus) and the rate at which bees reach that feeder (adaptivity). Our mathematical framework allows us to compare a suite of social inhibition mechanisms, suggesting experimental protocols for revealing effective colony foraging strategies in dynamic environments.
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Affiliation(s)
- Subekshya Bidari
- Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
| | - Orit Peleg
- Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
- BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
- Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
| | - Zachary P. Kilpatrick
- Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
- Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO 80045, USA
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Cook CN, Mosquiero T, Brent CS, Ozturk C, Gadau J, Pinter-Wollman N, Smith BH. Individual differences in learning and biogenic amine levels influence the behavioural division between foraging honeybee scouts and recruits. J Anim Ecol 2019; 88:236-246. [PMID: 30289166 PMCID: PMC6379132 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.12911] [Citation(s) in RCA: 28] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/18/2018] [Accepted: 08/31/2018] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
Animals must effectively balance the time they spend exploring the environment for new resources and exploiting them. One way that social animals accomplish this balance is by allocating these two tasks to different individuals. In honeybees, foraging is divided between scouts, which tend to explore the landscape for novel resources, and recruits, which tend to exploit these resources. Exploring the variation in cognitive and physiological mechanisms of foraging behaviour will provide a deeper understanding of how the division of labour is regulated in social insect societies. Here, we uncover how honeybee foraging behaviour may be shaped by predispositions in performance of latent inhibition (LI), which is a form of non-associative learning by which individuals learn to ignore familiar information. We compared LI between scouts and recruits, hypothesizing that differences in learning would correlate with differences in foraging behaviour. Scouts seek out and encounter many new odours while locating novel resources, while recruits continuously forage from the same resource, even as its quality degrades. We found that scouts show stronger LI than recruits, possibly reflecting their need to discriminate forage quality. We also found that scouts have significantly elevated tyramine compared to recruits. Furthermore, after associative odour training, recruits have significantly diminished octopamine in their brains compared to scouts. These results suggest that individual variation in learning behaviour shapes the phenotypic behavioural differences between different types of honeybee foragers. These differences in turn have important consequences for how honeybee colonies interact with their environment. Uncovering the proximate mechanisms that influence individual variation in foraging behaviour is crucial for understanding the ecological context in which societies evolve.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chelsea N Cook
- Arizona State University, School of Life Sciences, Tempe, Arizona
| | - Thiago Mosquiero
- University of California at Los Angeles, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Los Angeles, California
| | - Colin S. Brent
- USDA – ALARC, Department of Pest Management, Maricopa, Arizona
| | - Cahit Ozturk
- Arizona State University, School of Life Sciences, Tempe, Arizona
| | - Jürgen Gadau
- Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, University of Münster Germany
| | - Noa Pinter-Wollman
- University of California at Los Angeles, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Los Angeles, California
| | - Brian H. Smith
- Arizona State University, School of Life Sciences, Tempe, Arizona
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Dunlap AS, Papaj DR, Dornhaus A. Sampling and tracking a changing environment: persistence and reward in the foraging decisions of bumblebees. Interface Focus 2017; 7:20160149. [PMID: 28479985 PMCID: PMC5413896 DOI: 10.1098/rsfs.2016.0149] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Abstract
The question of when to collect new information and how to apply that information is central to much of behaviour. Theory suggests that the value of collecting information, or sampling, depends on environmental persistence and on the relative costs of making wrong decisions. However, empirical tests of how these variables interact are lacking. We tested whether bumblebee foraging decisions are indeed influenced by these two factors. We gave bees repeated choices between a resource providing a steady, mediocre reward and a resource fluctuating between a low reward and a high reward. In this paradigm, we manipulated environmental persistence by changing how long the quality of a fluctuating resource remained stable at one reward level. We manipulated the costs of decision errors by changing the relative values of the available rewards. Bees sampled the fluctuating resource more frequently when it changed quality more frequently, indicating that they measured environmental persistence and reacted to it as predicted by theory. Bees showed surprisingly suboptimal tracking, not reliably choosing the currently best resource except when the fluctuating resource was very persistent and the potential rewards high. While bees modify their choices in response to different levels of change and potential rewards, they do not always do so according to optimality predictions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Aimee S. Dunlap
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
- Department of Biology, University of Missouri, St Louis, MO, USA
| | - Daniel R. Papaj
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
| | - Anna Dornhaus
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
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Ogilvie JE, Thomson JD. Site fidelity by bees drives pollination facilitation in sequentially blooming plant species. Ecology 2016; 97:1442-51. [DOI: 10.1890/15-0903.1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 34] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/18/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Jane E. Ogilvie
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; University of Toronto; 25 Harbord Street Toronto Ontario M5S 3G5 Canada
- The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory; Post Office Box 519 Crested Butte Colorado 81224-0519 USA
| | - James D. Thomson
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; University of Toronto; 25 Harbord Street Toronto Ontario M5S 3G5 Canada
- The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory; Post Office Box 519 Crested Butte Colorado 81224-0519 USA
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Rivera MD, Donaldson-Matasci M, Dornhaus A. Quitting time: When do honey bee foragers decide to stop foraging on natural resources? Front Ecol Evol 2015. [DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00050] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
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11
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Sherry DF, Strang CG. Contrasting styles in cognition and behaviour in bumblebees and honeybees. Behav Processes 2014; 117:59-69. [PMID: 25218105 DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2014.09.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 20] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/25/2014] [Revised: 09/02/2014] [Accepted: 09/02/2014] [Indexed: 02/05/2023]
Abstract
Bumblebees and honeybees have been the subjects of a great deal of recent research in animal cognition. Many of the major topics in cognition, including memory, attention, concept learning, numerosity, spatial cognition, timing, social learning, and metacognition have been examined in bumblebees, honeybees, or both. Although bumblebees and honeybees are very closely related, they also differ in important ways, including social organization, development, and foraging behaviour. We examine whether differences between bumblebees and honeybees in cognitive processes are related to differences in their natural history and behaviour. There are differences in some cognitive traits, such as serial reversal learning and matching-to-sample, that appear related to differences between bumblebees and honeybees in foraging and social behaviour. Other cognitive processes, such as numerosity, appear to be very similar. Despite the wealth of information that is available on some aspects of bumblebee and honeybee cognition and behaviour, there are relatively few instances, however, in which adequate data exist to make direct comparisons. We highlight a number of phenomena, including concept learning, spatial cognition, timing, and metacognition, for which targeted comparative research may reveal unexpected adaptive variation in cognitive processes in these complex animals. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: In Honor of Jerry Hogan.
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Affiliation(s)
- David F Sherry
- Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 5C2.
| | - Caroline G Strang
- Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 5C2
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12
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Bee reverse-learning behavior and intra-colony differences: Simulations based on behavioral experiments reveal benefits of diversity. Ecol Modell 2014. [DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.01.009] [Citation(s) in RCA: 28] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
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13
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Fawcett TW, Fallenstein B, Higginson AD, Houston AI, Mallpress DE, Trimmer PC, McNamara JM. The evolution of decision rules in complex environments. Trends Cogn Sci 2014; 18:153-61. [DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 157] [Impact Index Per Article: 15.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/17/2013] [Revised: 12/21/2013] [Accepted: 12/23/2013] [Indexed: 01/13/2023]
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Al Toufailia H, Grüter C, Ratnieks FL. Persistence to Unrewarding Feeding Locations by Honeybee Foragers (Apis mellifera): the Effects of Experience, Resource Profitability and Season. Ethology 2013. [DOI: 10.1111/eth.12170] [Citation(s) in RCA: 34] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Hasan Al Toufailia
- Laboratory of Apiculture & Social Insects; School of Life Science; University of Sussex; Falmer UK
| | - Christoph Grüter
- Laboratory of Apiculture & Social Insects; School of Life Science; University of Sussex; Falmer UK
| | - Francis L.W. Ratnieks
- Laboratory of Apiculture & Social Insects; School of Life Science; University of Sussex; Falmer UK
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