2018-07-08 18:47:29
A group of researchers from the universities of Melbourne, Australia, and Toulouse, France, are studying whether our favorite insect, the honey bee, is capable of understanding the concept of zero. It may seem like a crazy idea to study this in these industrious little animals, but we must not forget that bees are one of the few species of invertebrate animals that have the ability to speak, also considered exclusively human until not so long ago.
To study this issue, the researchers carry out a series of ingenious experiments, in which they are able to train bees to distinguish between different quantities. Bees are trained in two ways. In both, these insects are conditioned to identify images that contain different numbers (from one to four) of black squares of different sizes. In the first modality, a sweet substance (reward) is provided when the bees choose the image with the most squares, and an unpleasant substance is provided when they choose the image with the least number of squares. In the second modality, the opposite is done with a different group of bees. After a series of iterations, the two groups of bees learn to very reliably identify the image that provides the reward. Thus, the first group of bees is trained to prefer larger amounts of each other, and the second is trained to prefer smaller amounts of each other.
This ability is confirmed by now presenting the bees with images that contain different numbers not just of squares but of circles. If the bees correctly chose the different numbers of circles, this would mean that they have acquired the concept of quantity regardless of the type of stimulus (squares or circles) that they are presented with. In other words, the bees would have developed an abstract concept of the difference between quantities. This was indeed what happened, since they were able to correctly identify the numerical differences with images that contained circles in amounts that were also different from those used in training with squares.
Once trained in this way, the bees were presented with two new images. One of them represented a single circle, but the other was a blank image that did not show any circle, that is, it was an image corresponding to the number zero, which the bees had never seen before. Previous studies had shown that some animals have serious difficulties in distinguishing between zero and one. However, this does not seem to be the case with the bees, which made the choice that led to the reward with great certainty according to the training they had received.
These and other experiments in the study reported here indicate that bees can learn some math and learn the concepts of greater than and less than. The studies also indicate the important fact that bees are able to understand the concept of zero and correctly position this value in relation to other numerical values. As far as the concept of zero is concerned, this places bees on a cognitive level similar to that of non-human primates. Thus, the concept of zero enjoys an amazingly long tradition in animal evolution, something my math teacher was no doubt unaware of.
Reference: Scarlett R. Howard et al. (2018). Numerical ordering of zeros in honey bees. Science, 8 June 2018 • VOL 360 ISSUE 6393.
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