Motion cues from the background influence associative color learning of honey bees in a virtual-reality scenario

Honey bees exhibit remarkable visual learning capacities, which can be studied using virtual reality (VR) landscapes in laboratory conditions. Existing VR environments for bees are imperfect as they provide either open-loop conditions or 2D displays. Here we achieved a true 3D environment in which walking bees learned to discriminate a rewarded from a punished virtual stimulus based on color differences. We included ventral or frontal background cues, which were also subjected to 3D updating based on the bee movements. We thus studied if and how the presence of such motion cues affected visual discrimination in our VR landscape. Our results showed that the presence of frontal, and to a lesser extent, of ventral background motion cues impaired the bees’ performance. Whenever these cues were suppressed, color discrimination learning became possible. We analyzed the specific contribution of foreground and background cues and discussed the role of attentional interference and differences in stimulus salience in the VR environment to account for these results. Overall, we show how background and target cues may interact at the perceptual level and influence associative learning in bees. In addition, we identify issues that may affect decision-making in VR landscapes, which require specific control by experimenters.