Oberhauser, F. B. and Koch, A. and De Agro, M. and Rex, K. and Czaczkes, T. J. (2020) Ants resort to heuristics when facing relational-learning tasks they cannot solve. PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 287 (1932): 20201262. ISSN 0962-8452, 1471-2954
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
We humans sort the world around us into conceptual groups, such as 'the same' or 'different', which facilitates many cognitive tasks. Applying such abstract concepts can improve problem-solving success and is therefore worth the cognitive investment. In this study, we investigated whether ants (Lasius niger) can learn the relational rule of 'the same' or 'different' by training them in an odour match-to-sample test over 48 visits. While ants in the 'different' treatment improved significantly over time, reaching around 65% correct decisions, ants in the 'same' treatment did not. Ants did not seem able to learn such abstract relational concepts, but instead created their own individual strategy to try to solve the problem: some ants decided to 'always go left', others preferred a 'go to the more salient cue' heuristic which systematically biased their decisions. These heuristics even occasionally lowered the success rate in the experiment below chance, indicating that followinganyrule may be more desirable then making truly random decisions. As the finding that ants resort to heuristics when facing hard-to-solve decisions was discoveredpost-hoc, we strongly encourage other researchers to ask whether employing heuristics in the face of challenging tasks is a widespread phenomenon in insects.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | SAME/DIFFERENT DISCRIMINATION; HONEY-BEES; BEHAVIOR; CONCEPTUALIZATION; CATEGORIZATION; MECHANISMS; SELECTION; PRIMATES; CONTEXT; MODELS; heuristics; rule learning; concept learning; ants; cognition |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 570 Life sciences 500 Science > 590 Zoological sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie > Zoologie/Evolutionsbiologie (Prof. Dr. Jürgen Heinze) |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Mar 2021 08:35 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Mar 2021 08:35 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/44027 |
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