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
Log in using your username and password
Log in through your institution
Pay Per Article - You may access this article (from the computer you are currently using) for 1 day for US$30.00 .
Regain Access - You can regain access to a recent Pay per Article purchase if your access period has not yet expired.
Article navigation
Related articles
Cited by...
More in this TOC section
Similar articles
Other journals from The Company of Biologists
Editorial – The changing of the guard
In his Editorial, Hans Hoppeler announces that he will be stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of JEB in July 2020. He reflects on the history of JEB, why he has enjoyed his tenure as JEB’s Editor-in-Chief and the recent developments in the publishing world.
Editors’ choice – Parental stressor exposure simultaneously conveys both adaptive and maladaptive larval phenotypes through epigenetic inheritance in the zebrafish (Danio rerio)
An oil spill is never a good thing, but Naim Bautista and Warren Burggren have shown that zebrafish can pass on resistance to the damaging effects of an oil-spiked diet to their offspring.
The derivative of force with respect to time does not have a standard term in physics. In their new Commentary, David C. Lin and his colleagues propose that the term ‘yank’ should be used to denote the time derivative of force.
Runners waste energy every time their legs stop swinging, but now a team of scientists from the US and Canada have shown that a springy ankle tether can reduce runners’ energy costs by 6.4%, which is nearly the entire cost of swinging the limbs. Read the full research article here.
Journal of Experimental Biology is pleased to announce a new partnership with Publons! This allows reviewers to easily track and verify every review by choosing to add the review to their Publons profile when completing the review submission form. Publons also makes it simple for reviewers to showcase their peer review contributions in a format that can be included in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity). Read the official announcement here!
The Company of Biologists provides grants to fund scientific meetings, workshops and conferences in the fields covered by our journals. Typically, meetings with fewer than 100 people may be granted up to £2,000, increasing up to £6,000 for about 400 people. The next deadline to apply is 28 November 2019.
preLights – preLights reaches 500 posts!
The success of preLights is down to the hard work of our preLighters. Head over to the preLights website to find out more about our most active early-career-researchers.