PATTERN-RECOGNITION IN THE HONEYBEE - RECENT PROGRESS

The biology of honeybees predisposes them to learn the colours and shapes of food-bearing flowers rapidly. Consequently, bees have been a very attractive organism in which to study the visual processes by which patterns are learned and recognized. Early research, carried out with patterns presented on a horizontal surface, suggested that bees distinguish between different patterns purely on the basis of the temporal frequency of intensity fluctuations (flicker) that the eyes experience as the bee flies over the patterns. Later work, in which patterns were presented in the vertical plane, indicated that bees are capable of distinguishing between patterns by acquiring a ''photographic'' image, or template, of the pattern at which they receive a reward. According to this hypothesis, the bee's ability to distinguish between patterns depends upon the extent to which each pattern overlaps with, or matches the stored template. Recently, evidence has been accumulating to suggest that bees are also capable of learning patterns without memorizing them in a literal fashion. For example, bees can abstract a general property of a pattern, such as its orientation, and use this property to distinguish between other patterns which they have never previoulsy encountered. It now appears that some of the mechanisms by which bees analyse visual patterns may not be very different, qualitatively, from those known to exist in the cortex of higher vertebrates