Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices.

Area of Science:

• Animal behavior
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Comparative psychology

Background:

• Human decision-making relies on metacognition, including awareness of certainty or uncertainty.
• The capacity for uncertainty monitoring in nonhuman animals, particularly insects, remains a contentious topic.
• Understanding animal metacognition offers insights into the evolution of cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether honey bees (Apis mellifera) exhibit uncertainty monitoring during a visual discrimination task.
• To determine if honey bees can selectively avoid tasks they are unlikely to solve.
• To explore the potential for metacognitive abilities in insects.

Main Methods:

• Honey bees performed a visual discrimination task with varying difficulty.
• Bees could choose to answer, receive a reward for correct choices, or be punished for incorrect ones.
• A key condition allowed bees to opt out of trials by exiting, with opting out serving as a measure of uncertainty.

Main Results:

• Honey bees opted out of trials more frequently when the task difficulty increased.
• Opting out significantly improved the bees' overall success rate in the task.
• Bees demonstrated the ability to transfer this opting-out strategy to a new, unfamiliar task.

Conclusions:

• Honey bees exhibit a form of metacognition by selectively avoiding difficult tasks, indicating an awareness of uncertainty.
• These findings suggest that nonhuman animals, including insects, may possess the ability to assess the certainty of outcomes.
• The study proposes a neurobiological hypothesis for uncertainty monitoring in the honey bee brain, paving the way for further research.