Selective Attention in Humans and Honeybees

In order to process the constant flow of visual stimuli received throughout the day, our visual system allocates its resources to the current task at hand, whilst suppressing irrelevant stimuli. Research has found that attention can be guided by absolute features (e.g. green), or by target-non target relations (e.g.: greener, larger). This paper sets out to investigate these claims as well as determine whether visual information is guided by absolute values, as proposed by the feature based account (Born & Kerzel, 2011), or by a relational mechanism where features are processed in relation to the current context (Becker, 2010). Humans and honeybees completed a discrimination task consisting of two stimuli varying in both position and colour. Participants (and bees) were encouraged to select the ‘high reward’ stimuli. In experiments1a and 2a, a new stimulus was presented in the test trial, which replaced the previous ‘low reward’ stimulus. The novel stimulus colour differed in the correct direction from the previous trained stimulus pair. Additionally, in experiments 1b and 2b, the new stimuli replaced the previous ‘high reward’ stimuli. The novel colour also differed in the correct direction from the previous stimuli pair. An analysis of the data indicated that the process of selection appears to be guided by absolute feature values. It was found that honeybees in addition to humans, when the novel stimulus was introduced, it was the preferred choice when presented in conjunction with the ‘low reward’ stimulus. Results suggest similar mechanisms may be underpinning selective attention in both honeybees and humans