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

Lin Chen*, Shaowu Zhang, Mandyam V. Srinivasan

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    98 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)6884-6889
    Number of pages6
    JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
    Volume100
    Issue number11
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 27 May 2003

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