The latest research results were published in eLife of Southern Medical University

On September 27, Professor Peng Fei's research group of the Department of Psychology of the School of Public Health published a research paper
entitled "Bumblebees retrieve only the ordinal ranking of foraging options when comparing memories obtained in distinct settings" online in eLife, an internationally renowned comprehensive journal of biology 。 The study elucidated six interlocking behavioral experiments of bumblebees visually linking learning and memory that bumblebees use only learned relative information (which option was better in past situations) rather than absolute information (the size of the reward provided by the option itself) when faced with different options
.

Figure 1 Article with Author Information

Value-based decision-making is a hot topic
in the fields of 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 the value judgment and decision-making of different options.
e.
g.
commodity prices) and comparative information (Comparative Information; For example, the relative value of an option compared to other options
).
European starlings have demonstrated a similar phenomenon in non-human animals, although research reports
are lacking in invertebrates.
Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) has good cognitive abilities and has been used in many decision-making paradigms in recent years, becoming an emerging species
to study decision-making and neural basis of the microbrain of invertebrates.
This study found that, unlike humans and birds, bumblebees can only save and use memories of relative information about options when making decisions, and this relative value memory is qualitative, not quantitative, that is, they can only judge the good and bad of different options, but cannot remember the relative degree
of good and bad options.

The three progressive experiments in Figure 2 found that bumblebees can only make subsequent decisions using the relative value memory of different options, and this memory is qualitative rather than quantitative
.

This study further found that bumblebees cannot remember short-term memory in the short term memory; Minutes to tens of minutes) outside of memory of absolute information about options (reward size): Train the bumblebee to learn one option, and then train it to learn another option with a different reward size after 1 hour, and the bumblebee cannot successfully compare the reward size
of the two options.
The study reveals that bumblebees differ from human and bird value decision-making mechanisms, and this difference may come from the unique
adaptations of different species to the environment.

Figure 3 Bumblebees receive a sugar water reward on orange artificial flowers

The Department of Psychology of the School of Public Health of Southern Medical University is the first and corresponding author of the paper, Professor Peng Fei of the Department of Psychology is the independent corresponding author of the paper, and collaborators from the University of Oulu in Finland, Queen Mary University of London and Macquarie University in Australia contributed to
the study 。 Professor Peng Fei's research group takes the bumblebee behavior experimental paradigm as the starting point, combines deep learning-based behavior tracking, neural drug intervention, neural circuit calculation model and other methods to explore the cognitive ability and neural basis of bumblebees, and has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Project (2018-2020) and the Surface Project (2020-2023), and the research results were published in Current Biology, PLOS Computational Biology.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, Animal Behaviour, etc
.