WPI Research Publication

FALL 2013

WPI Research is the research magazine of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It contains news and features about graduate research in the arts and sciences, business, and engineering, along with notes about new grants, books, and faculty achievements.

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With Bayesian modeling, Gegear has shown that bees have the capability to apply prior learning to current conditions to make effective decisions. As the environment changes, they will alter their foraging strategy to get the best proft. "It's not a simple stimulus response–driven behavior," says Gegear. "If it were, we would see bees choosing rewarding fowers as they are encountered in the environment. But they don't do that. Rather, bees are utilizing much more complex executive control functions that afford them a wide range of innovative solutions to behavioral problems. Our results demonstrate that natural selection has equipped bumblebees with a high degree of mental fexibility, which enables them to maximize energetic return under rapidly changing and highly unpredictable ecological conditions." There is a downside to such foral multitasking, and it's called the "switch cost." Bees must slow down each time they change between foraging tasks; psychologists observe the same lapse when humans subjects are asked to alternate between different numeric tasks. Gegear has found that bees will limit the frequency of task switches in order to minimize switch costs. Investigating these mental processes in the foraging life of the bee could help us better understand our own behaviors, he says. The small brain of the bee, which consists of just a few hundred thousand neurons, is an excellent learning tool, says Gegear. For even without a pre-frontal cortex (which is where such high-level cognitive processes are thought to be housed in humans), bees are capable of mental functions that were once thought to separate human intelligence from all other animals. "As a model system, the bee brain is similar to the human brain, but it is far simpler and more accessible. If we can understand the psychological and neurobiological basis of mental plasticity in the bee, it may provide clues to how our brains work." ARE PLANTS RUNNING THE SHOW? '' A bee's tendency to specialize in certain fowers — frst described by Aristotle — is still not understood. "Darwin struggled with this," notes Gegear, "because it didn't seem to make adaptive sense. Why would the pollinators make decisions that seem to beneft the plant, but not themselves?" The evolutionary purpose of foral complexity is also unclear. "Since Darwin," says Gegear, "much of the research in this area has focused on the relationship between fower color and type of pollinator (birds, bees, butterfies). But if all it takes is a color to attract a pollinator to a fower, then why do fowers look and smell the way they do? Why are there hundreds of thousands of fowering plants, each with a unique fower?" As a model system, the bee brain is similar to the human brain, but it is far simpler and more accessible. If we can understand the psychological and neurobiological basis of mental plasticity in the bee, it may provide clues to how our brains work. 14 > wpi.edu/+research

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