September 17, 2024, 10:10 am | Read time: 4 minutes
In order to collect food effectively, bumblebees must be able to remember the colors and shapes of flowers. However, even the insects occasionally make mistakes and “misremember.” This characteristic points to a memory capacity previously thought to be unique to humans.
You were sure you had parked your car right here – and then it turns out to be on the other side of the street. Such scatterbrained mistakes often happen to us humans because our memory is not an accurate reflection of what happened. A study by a British psychologist at the University of Stirling has now demonstrated that bumblebees are also prone to such errors. He questioned whether insects also experience false memories when faced with an array of stimuli. The results were published on September 14, 2024, in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Why our memory makes mistakes
We humans do not store our memories as accurate, individual images. Much of what we have experienced and learned is recombined in the brain during processing. This recombination process is crucial for memory, but it also makes our memory susceptible to errors. A distortion occurs in which our earlier memories influence the new ones that have just been added.
This is exactly what seems to happen with bumblebees. In the experiment, psychologist Dr. Martin-Ordas tested the memory of a total of 50 workers of different bumblebee species. To do this, he presented the insects with colored objects soaked in sugar—for instance, a yellow, circular paper stick or an orange, square paper strip. The insects associated these shapes and colors with the sweet reward, just as insects in nature would learn the shapes and colors of flowers that produce a lot of nectar.
Bumblebees also remember incorrectly
After a short time, he presented the bumblebees with four objects:
- one that they had previously encountered and positively associated with,
- one that consisted of two of the features of the previously presented objects,
- one with only one characteristic of the previously presented objects
- and a completely new object.
As expected, the insects usually chose the previously learned object first – because they had positively associated it with the sugar reward. Occasionally, however, the bumblebees made a cognitive error and selected one of the objects that shared two similar features with the one they had previously learned. In other words, they remembered incorrectly.
Evidence for an episodic memory?
These false memories arise because the recollections are not exact replicas of the experiences, but rather, the memories are reconstructed. This is also referred to as constructive memory. Our brain reconstructs experienced events and fills them with plausible details. 1
The errors that arise in the process are characteristic of episodic memory. This enables the recollection of personal experiences within a specific spatial and temporal context.2 Many psychologists assume that episodic memory only occurs in humans.
If the thinking errors made by the bumblebees in the study were actually due to the fact that the elements such as color or shape of the objects to be remembered were incorrectly mixed together, it could be concluded that the bees’ memory is also constructive, explains Dr. Martin-Orda in the science magazine Phys.org.
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Bumblebee thinking errors offer interesting research approach
“It is quite plausible to expect this type of error to be present in bumblebees, as their natural way of life is to encode and recall features from multiple stimuli, for example, flowers,” continues Orda.
However, a study involving merely 50 individuals does not constitute definitive proof of episodic memory in social insects like bumblebees or bees. However, the results suggest that there are constructive processes in the memory of bees, although more research is still needed, as Orda admits.
For example, the errors in thinking that the bumblebees made in the experiment offer an interesting research approach for investigating episodic memory from a new perspective. Therefore, Orda concludes that research in this field is poised to move beyond ‘our established paradigms and old debates’ into a more mature and constructive phase.
Bumblebees might appear to be an unconventional research subject to some, yet these social insects bear more resemblance to us than one might assume.