Relational reasoning in wild bumblebees revisited: the role of distance.

ABSTRACT: In reasoning tasks, non-human animals attend more to relational than to object similarity. It is precisely this focus on relational similarity that has been argued to explain the reasoning gap between humans and other animals. Work with humans has revealed that objects placed near each other are represented to be more similar than objects placed farther apart. Will distance between objects also affect non-human animals' abilities to represent and reason about objects? To test this, wild bumblebees were presented with a spatial reasoning task (with competing object matches) in which the objects or features alone (colour, shape) were placed close together or far apart. Bumblebees spontaneously attended to objects over relations, but only when the objects were far apart. Features alone were n

SUBMITTER: Martin-Ordas G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10724225 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature