Bumblebees also make human mistakes

September 16 () –

Psychologists of the University of Stirling They have carried out research that shows that wild bumblebees make the same memory errors as humans.

The article, titled “The constructive nature of memories in insects: bumblebees as a case study,” was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

When presented with a variety of stimuli, bumblebees were found to misremember a key component of the memory system. episodic memory that many psychologists maintain is exclusive to humans.

Wild bumblebees were presented with colorful objects soaked in sucrose, such as a strip of orange paper or a round yellow paper stick.

After a short period of time, the bees were presented with four objects: one that had been previously presented to them; one composed of two of the previously presented objects’ features; one with only one feature of the previously presented objects; and one completely new object.

The bumblebees then selected one of these objects by exploring it with their antennae or proboscis. In a series of random trials, the bumblebees often remembered to go to the original object to search for the sucrose, but they also made mistakes when selecting a similar stimulus of a different shape or color.

The bumblebees made the same mistakes as humans in similar tasks. These memory errors are characteristic of a type of memory that is considered exclusively human, episodic memory: the ability to remember past events, for example, our recent vacation.

Dr Gema Martin-Ordas, who carried out the study at the University of Stirling, said in a statement“In humans, it is held that recombination processes that are critical for memory recall make memory prone to errors arising from the miscombination of elements from stored episodes.

“In this context, memory conjunction errors are common forms of memory distortions, and the results presented here show evidence that bees spontaneously make memory conjunction errors.

“If the conjunction errors made by bees in the current studies arise from the erroneous fusion of elements of the objects to be remembered, then one might be tempted to conclude that bees’ memories are also constructive.

“It is entirely plausible to expect that these types of errors are present in bees because their natural lifestyle involves encoding and retrieving features of various stimuli, for example, flowers.”

The experiments with 50 bumblebees were carried out in June and July 2022. The objects were presented to the bees housed in transparent plastic tubes and all of them were released into the wild.

Dr Martin-Ordas, a senior lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Stirling, added: “The findings tantalizingly suggest the presence of constructive processes in bees’ memories, although further research is needed.

“Memory error paradigms, such as the one presented here, offer an interesting avenue of research to examine episodic memory from a new perspective, since constructive processes can be used to combine and recombine elements of past events to imagine future events.

“The comparative field of episodic memory is therefore ripe to be taken beyond our established paradigms and old debates, and into a more mature and constructive phase.”