Bumblebee has a poor memory, but it is useful

On September 27, Professor Peng Fei's research group of Southern Medical University published a research paper
entitled "Bumblebees retrieve only the ordinal ranking of foraging options when comparing memories obtained in distinct settings" online in the internationally renowned comprehensive journal of biology "eLife".

The study, which uses six interlocking behavioral experiments on the visual connection of learning and memory in bumblebees, shows that when faced with different options, bees only use the relative information they have learned in the past (which option is relatively better in the past situation) rather than absolute information (the size of the reward provided by the option itself) to make decisions
.

Value-based decision-making is a hot issue
in psychology, neuroscience, economics, and computational biology.
In recent years, human psychology research has found that human beings will use the absolute information of different options at the same time for value judgment and decision-making of different options.
e.
g.
commodity prices) and relative information (Comparative Information; For example, the relative value of an option compared to other options).

In non-human animals, the European starling has shown a similar phenomenon, but there is a lack of research in
invertebrates.

Bumblebee (Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, the prototype of the bumblebee) has good cognitive abilities and has been used in multiple decision-making paradigms in recent years, becoming an emerging species
to study the decision-making and neural basis of invertebrate microbrains.

This study found that, unlike humans and birds, bumblebees can only save and use the memory of relative information about options when making decisions, and this relative value memory is qualitative rather than quantitative, that is, it can only judge the good and bad of different options, but cannot remember the relative degree
of good and bad options.

This study further found that bumblebees are unable to remember short-term memory; minutes to tens of minutes) outside of using the memory of absolute information about the option (reward size): Bumblebees are trained to learn one option, and then trained to learn another option with a different reward size after 1 hour, and Bumblebees cannot successfully compare the reward sizes
of the two options.
The study reveals the value decision-making mechanisms that differ from humans and birds, and that this difference may come from the way
different species adapt to their environment.

Head of the Department of Psychology, School of Public Health

Peng Fei

Professor/PhD supervisor

The Department of Psychology, School of Public Health, Southern Medical University, was the first and corresponding author of the paper, Professor Peng Fei of our department was the independent corresponding author of the paper, and collaborators from the University of Oulu in Finland, Queen Mary University in London, UK, and Macquarie University in Australia contributed to the study
.
Professor Peng Fei's research group took the experimental paradigm of bumblebee behavior as the starting point, combined with deep learning-based behavior tracking, neuro-drug intervention, neural circuit computational model and other methods to explore the cognitive ability and neural basis of bumblebees, and successively won the National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Program ( 2018-2020) and the General Project (2020-2023), the research results have been published in current biology, PLOS Computational Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, Animal Behaviour and other international high-level journals
.

Full text link: https://doi.
org/10.
7554/eLife.
78525