Simultaneous mastering of two abstract concepts by the miniature brain of bees
Simultaneous mastering of two abstract concepts by the miniature brain of bees
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1202576109
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发表时间：
2012-05-08
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Giurfa, Martin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Avargues-Weber, Aurore;Dyer, Adrian G.;Giurfa, Martin
将物体和事件分类和概念是一种基本的认知能力，可以减少我们在日常生活中遇到的每一个特定情况的学习成本。关系概念，如“相同”，“不同”，“优于”或“大于”等，在人类认知中是必不可少的，因为它们允许对事件进行高效的分类，而不管物理相似性如何。掌握一个关系概念需要大脑独立于由关系联系的物理对象来编码关系，因此与抽象能力是一致的。一次处理几个概念的前提是更高水平的认知复杂性，这在无脊椎动物中是不可能的。我们发现，蜜蜂的微型大脑可以快速学习同时掌握两个抽象概念，一个基于空间关系（上/下和右/左），另一个基于对差异的感知。蜜蜂学会了分类视觉目标，通过使用这种双重概念转移他们的选择未知的刺激，提供了一个最佳匹配的双重概念的可用性：他们的组件提出了适当的空间关系和彼此不同。这项研究揭示了一种令人惊讶的能力，大脑可以从一组复杂的图片中提取抽象的概念，并将它们联合收割机组合成一个规则，供随后的选择。因此，这一发现为理解认知处理是如何通过相对简单的神经结构实现的提供了极好的机会。
Sorting objects and events into categories and concepts is a fundamental cognitive capacity that reduces the cost of learning every particular situation encountered in our daily lives. Relational concepts such as "same," "different," "better than," or "larger than"-among others-are essential in human cognition because they allow highly efficient classifying of events irrespective of physical similarity. Mastering a relational concept involves encoding a relationship by the brain independently of the physical objects linked by the relation and is, therefore, consistent with abstraction capacities. Processing several concepts at a time presupposes an even higher level of cognitive sophistication that is not expected in an invertebrate. We found that the miniature brains of honey bees rapidly learn to master two abstract concepts simultaneously, one based on spatial relationships (above/below and right/left) and another based on the perception of difference. Bees that learned to classify visual targets by using this dual concept transferred their choices to unknown stimuli that offered a best match in terms of dual-concept availability: their components presented the appropriate spatial relationship and differed from one another. This study reveals a surprising facility of brains to extract abstract concepts from a set of complex pictures and to combine them in a rule for subsequent choices. This finding thus provides excellent opportunities for understanding how cognitive processing is achieved by relatively simple neural architectures.