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How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image
A century ago, in his study of colour vision in the honeybee (Apis mellifera), Karl von Frisch showed that bees distinguish between a disc that is half yellow, half blue, and a mirror image of the same. Although his inference of colour vision in this example has been accepted, some discrepancies hav...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2015
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4305292/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25617892 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116224 |
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author | Horridge, Adrian |
author_facet | Horridge, Adrian |
author_sort | Horridge, Adrian |
collection | PubMed |
description | A century ago, in his study of colour vision in the honeybee (Apis mellifera), Karl von Frisch showed that bees distinguish between a disc that is half yellow, half blue, and a mirror image of the same. Although his inference of colour vision in this example has been accepted, some discrepancies have prompted a new investigation of the detection of polarity in coloured patterns. In new experiments, bees restricted to their blue and green receptors by exclusion of ultraviolet could learn patterns of this type if they displayed a difference in green contrast between the two colours. Patterns with no green contrast required an additional vertical black line as a landmark. Tests of the trained bees revealed that they had learned two inputs; a measure and the retinotopic position of blue with large field tonic detectors, and the measure and position of a vertical edge or line with small-field phasic green detectors. The angle between these two was measured. This simple combination was detected wherever it occurred in many patterns, fitting the definition of an algorithm, which is defined as a method of processing data. As long as they excited blue receptors, colours could be any colour to human eyes, even white. The blue area cue could be separated from the green receptor modulation by as much as 50°. When some blue content was not available, the bees learned two measures of the modulation of the green receptors at widely separated vertical edges, and the angle between them. There was no evidence that the bees reconstructed the lay-out of the pattern or detected a tonic input to the green receptors. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4305292 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43052922015-01-30 How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image Horridge, Adrian PLoS One Research Article A century ago, in his study of colour vision in the honeybee (Apis mellifera), Karl von Frisch showed that bees distinguish between a disc that is half yellow, half blue, and a mirror image of the same. Although his inference of colour vision in this example has been accepted, some discrepancies have prompted a new investigation of the detection of polarity in coloured patterns. In new experiments, bees restricted to their blue and green receptors by exclusion of ultraviolet could learn patterns of this type if they displayed a difference in green contrast between the two colours. Patterns with no green contrast required an additional vertical black line as a landmark. Tests of the trained bees revealed that they had learned two inputs; a measure and the retinotopic position of blue with large field tonic detectors, and the measure and position of a vertical edge or line with small-field phasic green detectors. The angle between these two was measured. This simple combination was detected wherever it occurred in many patterns, fitting the definition of an algorithm, which is defined as a method of processing data. As long as they excited blue receptors, colours could be any colour to human eyes, even white. The blue area cue could be separated from the green receptor modulation by as much as 50°. When some blue content was not available, the bees learned two measures of the modulation of the green receptors at widely separated vertical edges, and the angle between them. There was no evidence that the bees reconstructed the lay-out of the pattern or detected a tonic input to the green receptors. Public Library of Science 2015-01-24 /pmc/articles/PMC4305292/ /pubmed/25617892 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116224 Text en © 2015 Adrian Horridge http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Horridge, Adrian How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title | How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title_full | How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title_fullStr | How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title_full_unstemmed | How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title_short | How Bees Discriminate a Pattern of Two Colours from Its Mirror Image |
title_sort | how bees discriminate a pattern of two colours from its mirror image |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4305292/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25617892 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116224 |
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