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Published online on May 15, 2003, 10.1073/pnas.0732090100
PNAS | May 27, 2003 | vol. 100 | no. 11 | 6884-6889


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PSYCHOLOGY
Global perception in small brains: Topological pattern recognition in honey bees

Lin Chen * {dagger}, Shaowu Zhang {ddagger}, and Mandyam V. Srinivasan {ddagger}

*Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science, Graduate School, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 15 Datun Road, 100101 Beijing, China; and {ddagger}Centre for Visual Science, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, P.O. Box 475, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

Communicated by Robert Desimone, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, April 10, 2003 (received for review December 8, 2002)

A series of experiments with honey bees demonstrate that their small brains nevertheless possess the ability for topological perception. Bees rapidly learned to discriminate patterns that are topologically different, and they generalized the learned cue to other novel patterns. By contrast, discrimination of topologically equivalent patterns was learned much more slowly and not as well. Thus, although the global nature of topological properties makes their computation difficult, topology may be a fundamental component of the vocabulary by which visual systems represent and characterize objects.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: cl{at}cogsci.ibp.ac.cn.


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