Interindividual variation in the use of social information during learning in honeybees

Abstract

Slow–fast differences in cognition among individuals have been proposed to be an outcome of the speed–accuracy trade-off in decision-making. Based on the different costs associated with acquiring information via individual and social learning, we hypothesized that slow–fast cognitive differences would also be tied to the adoption of these different learning modes. Since foragers in honeybee colonies likely have both these information acquisition modes available to them, we chose to test them for interindividual differences in individual and social learning. By measuring performance on a learning task with and without a social cue and quantifying learning rate and maximum accuracy in these two tasks, our results show the existence of a speed–accuracy trade-off in both the individual and the social learning contexts. However, the trade-off is steeper during individual learning, which was slower than social learning but led to higher accuracy. Most importantly, our results also show that bees that attained high accuracy on the individual learning task had low accuracy on the social learning task andvice versa. We discuss how these two information acquisition strategies tie to slow–fast differences in cognitive phenotypes and how they might contribute to division of labour and social behaviour.