CDS Lecture Series

Mandyam V. Srinivasan
Centre for Visual Sciences
Research School of Biological Sciences Australian National University

SMALL BRAINS, SMART MINDS: VISION, NAVIGATION AND ‘COGNITION’ INON HEYBEE

Insects, in general, and honeybees, in particular, perform remarkably well at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it, despite possessing a brain that weighs less than a milligram and carries fewer than 0.01% as many neurons as ours does. Working together with our colleagues, we have been trying to unravel the secrets of their success.

Although most insects lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully in it. For example, distances to objects are gauged in terms of the apparent speeds of motion of the objects' images, rather than by using complex stereo mechanisms. Objects are distinguished from backgrounds by sensing the apparent relative motion at the boundary. Narrow gaps are negotiated by balancing the apparent speeds of the images in the two eyes. Flight speed is regulated by holding constant the average image velocity as seen by both eyes. Bees landing on a horizontal surface hold constant the image velocity of the surface as they approach it, thus automatically ensuring that flight speed is close to zero at touchdown. Foraging bees gauge distance flown by integrating optic flow: they possess a visually-driven "odometer" that is robust to variations in wind, body weight, energy expenditure, and the properties of the visual environment.

Recent research on honeybee perception and cognition is beginning to reveal that these insects may not be the simple, reflexive creatures that they were once assumed to be. For example, bees can learn rather general features of flowers and landmarks, such as colour, orientation and symmetry, and apply them to distinguish between objects that they have never previously encountered. Bees exhibit “top-down” processing: that is, they are capable of using prior knowledge to detect poorly visible or camouflaged objects. They can navigate through labyrinths by learning path regularities, and by using symbolic signposts. They can learn to form complex associations and to acquire abstract concepts such as “sameness” and “difference”. Bees are also capable of associative recall: that is, a familiar scent can trigger recall of an associated colour, or even of a navigational route to a food location. All of these observations suggest that there is no hard dichotomy between invertebrates and vertebrates in the context of perception, learning and ‘cognition’; and that brain size is not necessarily a reliable predictor of perceptual capacity.

Finally, some of the above principles – especially those that relate vision and navigation – are offering novel, computationally elegant solutions to persistent problems in machine vision and robot navigation. Thus, we have been using some of the insect-based strategies described above to design, implement and test biologically-inspired algorithms for the guidance of autonomous terrestrial and aerial vehicles.