Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees: Cognitive specialization within sensory and reinforcement modalities

Abstract

Abstract The question of whether individuals perform consistently across a variety of cognitive tasks is relevant for studies of comparative cognition. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is an appropriate model to study cognitive consistency as its learning can be studied in multiple elemental and non-elemental learning tasks. We took advantage of this possibility and studied if the ability of honey bees to learn a simple discrimination correlates with their ability to solve two tasks of higher complexity, reversal learning and negative patterning. We performed four experiments in which we varied the sensory modality of the stimuli (visual or olfactory) and the type (Pavlovian or operant) and complexity (elemental or non-elemental) of conditioning to examine if stable correlated performances could be observed across experiments. Across all experiments, the individual’s proficiency to learn the simple discrimination task was positively correlated with the performance in both reversal learning and negative patterning, while the performances in reversal learning and negative patterning were not correlated. These results suggest that this pattern of correlated and independent performances across the learning paradigms tested represent a distinct cognitive characteristic of bees. Further research is necessary to examine if this pattern of individual cognitive consistency can be found in other insect species as a common characteristic of insect brains.