ACTIVE VISION IN HONEYBEES - TASK-ORIENTED SUPPRESSION OF AN INNATE BEHAVIOR

In a pattern discrimination task, bees tend to fly along the contours contained in the patterns, as revealed by an earlier study. As opposed to this, in a task involving the detection of an edge between two str iped surfaces placed at two different ranges, the bees avoid contour-f ollowing, as revealed by the present study. The study shows that, in t he latter task, the bees learn to suppress the otherwise innate contou r-following behaviour and adopt a flight strategy that provides them w ith the motion parallax cues necessary to cope with this task. Thus, t he animal's active behaviour determines the type of visual information to be extracted from the environment.