The Peng Fei team from the Department of Psychology of the School of Public Health published the latest research results in eLife

Recently, Professor Peng Fei's research group of the Department of Psychology of the School of Public Health published a research paper
entitled "Bumblebees retrieve only the ordinal ranking of foraging options when comparing memories obtained in distinct settings" online in the internationally renowned biology comprehensive journal "eLife" 。 The study used six interlocking behavioral experiments on bumblebee visual association learning and memory to show that bumblebees used only previously learned relative information (which option was better in past situations) rather than absolute information (the size of the reward provided by the option itself) to make decisions
when faced with different options.
The study was reported on the front page of China Science Daily (October 13, Issue 8118).

Figure: Screenshot of article and author information (Source: School of Public Health, Southern Medical University)

Value-based decision-making is a hot topic
in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, economics and computational biology.
In recent years, human psychology research has found that human beings will use the absolute information of different options at the same time for value judgment and decision-making of different options; e.
g.
commodity prices) and comparative information; For example, the relative value of an option compared to other options).

In non-human animals, European starlings have shown similar phenomena, although there is a lack of research among invertebrates
.
Bumblebee (Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris) has good cognitive ability and has been used in multiple decision-making paradigms in recent years, becoming an emerging species
to study the decision-making and neural basis of the invertebrate miniature brain.
This study found that unlike humans and birds, bumblebees can only save and use the memory of the relative information of options when making decisions, and this relative value memory is qualitative rather than quantitative, that is, it can only judge the good and bad of different options, but cannot remember the relative degree
of good and bad options.

Figure: Three progressive experiments (Source: School of Public Health, Southern Medical University)

This study further found that bumblebees cannot be short-term memory; Minutes to tens of minutes) using the memory of absolute information about the options (reward size): Bumblebees are trained to learn one option and then trained to learn another option with a different reward size after 1 hour, and bumblebees cannot successfully compare the reward size
of the two options.
The study reveals that bumblebees differ from humans and birds in value-making mechanisms, and that this difference may stem from the way
different species adapt to their environment.

Photo: Bumblebees receive sugar water rewards on orange artificial flowers (Photo: Lu Yuyi)

The Department of Psychology of the School of Public Health was the first and corresponding author of the paper, Professor Peng Fei of the Department of Psychology was the independent corresponding author of the paper, and collaborators from the University of Oulu in Finland, Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom, and Macquarie University in Australia contributed
to the study 。 Professor Peng Fei's research group took the experimental paradigm of bumblebee behavior as the starting point, combined with deep learning-based behavior tracking, neurodrug intervention, neural circuit calculation model and other methods to explore the cognitive ability and neural basis of bumblebees, and successively received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2018-2020) and the General Program (2020-2023), and the research results were published in Current Biology, PLOS Computational Biology.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, Animal Behaviour and other international high-level journals
.