Development of Sun Compass Orientation: An Invertebrate Model for the Study of Spatial Cognition

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Dyer 960452 5 One of the most exciting frontiers in science concerns the problem of how the nervous systems of animals and use information about the natural environments in which they must survive and reproduce. Studying this problem in insects offers the hope that given the relatively small size of the nervous system, we might understand such cognitive phenomena on the neural level sooner than later. A first step, however, is to find evidence of interesting cognitive processes in insects, and to characterize the behavioral capacities that these processes support. This project takes on this challenge by considering how honey bees learn the daily pattern of movement of the sun. A wide variety of animal species, both vertebrate and invertebrate, use the sun as a true compass, which requires compensating for its movement relative to earth-bound features of the environment. To compensate at a rate that is appropriate for the season and latitude at which they are living, most animals learn the current local pattern of solar movement. What little is known about this learning process suggests that animals do not merely memorize a list of solar positions experienced at different times of day. Instead, in several vertebrate and invertebrate species, including honey bees, animals have been shown to estimate the sun's position at times of day (or night) when they have never seen it. This phenomenon is extremely attractive as a focus for behavioral analysis. The animals exhibit an apparently "cognitive" form of learning, acquiring an internal representation of an environmental pattern in which at least part of the information contained in the representation is derived through computation rather than through direct experience. The experiments in this project are designed to characterize more fully just what honey bees learn about the sun's course and how they learn it. A major focus will be to study the interaction between a bee's inborn knowledge of gen eral features of solar movement and information that she acquires through experience. A long-term goal is to obtain insights that can contribute to a general understanding of the cognitive basis of spatial orientation in animals.