Shape perception in the honeybee: Symmetry as a global framework

This study is concerned with the honeybee's spatial vision in light of the spatial signals that natural flowers display. A large amount of behavioral data shows that bees are perfectly adept at learning and exploiting a varie ty of spatial cues in the task of recognizing and discriminating between vi sual stimuli. These cues include spatial frequency, distribution of contras ting areas, orientation of contours, size and distance, different types of edges, and symmetry (or, in a broader sense, geometry). Symmetry constitute s a global feature that is only one of the cues that the target offers. Sym metrical stimuli always contain several further spatial cues that become re levant as the bee comes nearer to the stimuli. The results reviewed here sh ow that the spatial signals used by the bee depend on whether the stimuli a re presented on a horizontal or a vertical plane, on whether bees make thei r choices at a lesser or a greater distance, and on whether the target's im age is stationary at the level of the eye, as opposed to moving. Further, i t is shown that pattern recognition in the bee does not always require a le arning process (i.e., several types of response to visual stimuli are based on hard-wired, innate behavioral programs). Finally, the results show that although it is not a prerequisite for spatial vision, color vision partici pates in spatial vision, whereas spatial cues extracted from image motion a re processed by a color-blind system.