Pattern recognition in bees: orientation discrimination

Honey bees (Apis mellifera, worker) were trained to discriminate between two random gratings oriented perpendicularly to each other. This task was quickly learned with vertical, horizontal, and oblique gratings. After being trained on perpendicularly-oriented random gratings, bees could discriminate between other perpendicularly-oriented patterns (black bars, white bars, thin lines, edges, spatial sinusoids, broken bars) as well. Several tests indicate that the stimuli were not discriminated on the basis of a literal image (eidetic template), but, rather, on the basis of orientation as a single parameter. An attempt to train bees to discriminate between two different random gratings oriented in the same direction was not successful, also indicating that the bees were not able to form a template of random gratings. Preliminary experiments with oriented 'Kanizsa rectangles' (analogue of Kanizsa triangle) suggest that edge detection in the bee may involve mechanisms similar to those that lead to the percept of illusory contours in humans.