Figure 2.

Bees use a win-stay/lose-switch strategy after extensive training. (A) There was a significant increase in the number of correct choices over the 180 conditioned choices (p = 0.018). (B) Bees’ performance over three blocks of 10 training bouts during the relative size discrimination task. Performance increased gradually over bouts when considering the total number of choices in each bout (black dashed line; p = 1.96e-4). Bees’ first choice performance increased significantly from the first to the second block of training bouts to 72.22% (p = 3.71e-4) but then dropped to chance level from the second to the third block of training bouts (blue dash-dotted line; p = 0.79). The second choice performance was near chance for the first two blocks of training bouts (p > 0.49) but then increased significantly during the third block of training bouts (green dotted line; p = 4.28e-4). These results indicate that bees changed to a win-stay/lose-switch strategy after extensive training. Vertical lines = standard error of the mean. Red dashed line = chance level performance (50%). (C,D) The average conditional probabilities of a bee’s second choice within each bout being correct given the outcome of the bee’s first choice of the bout (either correct or incorrect). Both conditional probabilities increased to above chance during the second and third blocks of bouts (p = 2.27e-4 for win-stay and p = 8.40e-4 for lose-switch). (E) Our win-stay/lose-switch model’s performance matches our bees’ performance on the task during the last block of 10 bouts during training (p = 0.15), again suggesting that after extensive training bees changed to a win-stay/lose-switch strategy (Vertical lines = standard error of the mean). Red dashed line = chance level. *p < 0.05 and n.s., p > 0.05.