The Cognitive Complexity of a Miniaturized Brain: Cognition and the Brain in Bees

Session 3: Animal
Intelligence Moderator: Nalini Anantharaman (Collège de France)

Abstract

Honeybees have a brain measuring barely one cubic millimeter, yet they exhibit a remarkably sophisticated behavioral repertoire. In addition to their historical role as models for the study of simple forms of associative learning, they have emerged as particularly interesting organisms for the study of higher-order forms of learning, in both the visual and olfactory domains. Over the past two decades, our research has shown that these insects possess unexpected cognitive abilities that go far beyond the simple acquisition of associations. Abilities such as categorization, selective attention, conceptual learning, and number sense, among others, have been demonstrated in bees. These findings raise fundamental questions about the neural architectures underlying these abilities and about what, if anything, distinguishes bees from other invertebrates. I will present some of these findings and examine their mechanistic basis, seeking, where possible, to link them to specific neural circuits and neuromodulation processes. I will also highlight the main experimental challenges associated with studying cognition in these animals and propose several avenues for better understanding the neurobiology of higher-order learning in insects.

Martin Giurfa

Martin Giurfa is a Franco-Argentine professor of neuroscience with exceptional standing at Sorbonne University in Paris. He is the director of the Paris-Seine Institute of Biology, an institute that brings together laboratories working in various fields of biology within the university. He earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1990. After spending 11 years in Berlin, Germany, where he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin, he moved to Toulouse, France, in 2001 as a tenured professor of neuroscience to establish the Center for Research on Animal Cognition, a research institute jointly affiliated with the CNRS and the University of Toulouse. He directed the institute from its founding until 2017. In 2023, he moved to Paris to become director of the Paris-Seine Institute of Biology at Sorbonne University. His research focuses on perceptual processes, learning, and memory in honeybees. He introduced a cognitive perspective to the study of learning and memory in insects following the discovery of honeybees’ remarkable cognitive abilities.