A groundbreaking new study from Queen Mary University of London is the first to show that an insect can differentiate between different durations of visual cues, with bumblebees successfully learning to distinguish between Morse code style dots and dashes, an ability previously seen only in humans and other vertebrates including macaques and pigeons. Researchers built a special maze to train individual bees to find a sugar reward at one of two flashing circles, with short flashes or “dots” associated with sugar while long flashes or “dashes” were paired with bitter quinine that bees dislike. At each room in the maze the position of the dot and dash stimulus changed so bees couldn’t rely on spatial cues, forcing them to truly learn the difference between flash durations rather than locations.
After bees learned to go straight to the correct flashing circle paired with sugar, they were tested with flashing lights but no sugar present to confirm their choices were driven by the light duration rather than olfactory or visual cues from the reward itself. PhD student Alex Davidson expressed excitement at seeing the bees succeed, noting it’s remarkable they could accomplish this task since they don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment. Most of the bees went straight to the correct flashing light duration previously associated with sugar regardless of spatial location, clearly showing they had learned to tell the lights apart based solely on duration in brains smaller than one cubic millimeter. The surprising ability to encode and process time duration might be a fundamental component of the nervous system intrinsic to neuron properties, with implications for understanding complex cognitive traits in artificial neural networks that should seek biological inspiration for maximum efficiency.
