Motion cues from the background influence associative color learning of honey bees in a virtual-reality scenario.

ABSTRACT: Honey bees exhibit remarkable visual learning capacities, which can be studied using virtual reality (VR) landscapes in laboratory conditions. Existing VR environments for bees are imperfect as they provide either open-loop conditions or 2D displays. Here we achieved a true 3D environment in which walking bees learned to discriminate a rewarded from a punished virtual stimulus based on color differences. We included ventral or frontal background cues, which were also subjected to 3D updating based on the bee movements. We thus studied if and how the presence of such motion cues affected visual discrimination in our VR landscape. Our results showed that the presence of frontal, and to a lesser extent, of ventral background motion cues impaired the bees' performance. Whenever these cues were

SUBMITTER: Lafon G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8548521 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature