ABSTRACT
Animals including humans, fish and honeybees have demonstrated a quantity discrimination threshold at four objects, often known as subitizing elements. Discrimination between numerosities at or above the subitizing range is considered a complex capacity. In the current study, we trained and tested two groups of bees on their ability to differentiate between quantities (4 versus 5 through to 4 versus 8) when trained with different conditioning procedures. Bees trained with appetitive (reward) differential conditioning demonstrated no significant learning of this task, and limited discrimination above the subitizing range. In contrast, bees trained using appetitive–aversive (reward–aversion) differential conditioning demonstrated significant learning and subsequent discrimination of all tested comparisons from 4 versus 5 to 4 versus 8. Our results show conditioning procedure is vital to performance on numerically challenging tasks, and may inform future research on numerical abilities in other animals.
FOOTNOTES
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: S.R.H., A.G.D.; Methodology: S.R.H., A.A.-W., A.G.D.; Formal analysis: S.R.H., J.E.G.; Investigation: S.R.H.; Resources: S.R.H., A.A.-W., A.G.D.; Data curation: S.R.H.; Writing - original draft: S.R.H.; Writing - review & editing: S.R.H., A.A.-W., J.E.G., A.D.G., A.G.D.; Visualization: A.G.D.; Supervision: S.R.H., A.A.-W., A.G.D.; Project administration: A.D.G., A.G.D.; Funding acquisition: S.R.H.
Funding
S.R.H. acknowledges the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship S.R.H. and A.A.-W. acknowledge the Fyssen Foundation.
Data availability
The raw choice data from tests of individual bees that support the findings of this study are available from the Dryad digital repository (Howard et al., 2019c): dryad.pm6v7nd
Supplementary information
Supplementary information available online at http://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.205658.supplemental
- Received April 23, 2019.
- Accepted September 2, 2019.
- © 2019. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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