"With experience, our brains can conduct these complex decision-making processes, but this is a type of cognitive task beyond current machine vision.
“Our research collaboration between labs in Australia and France wanted to understand if such simultaneous decision making required a large primate brain, or whether a honeybee might also demonstrate rule learning," he said in a release.
For their study, the researchers trained individual honeybees to fly into a Y-shaped maze which presented different elements in specific relationships like above/below, or left/right.
With extended training the bees were able to learn that the elements had to have two sets of rules including being in a specific relationship like above/below, while also possessing elements differing from each other.
Dr Dyer said the findings showed that possessing a large complex brain was not necessary to multiple simultaneous conceptual rule learning. "This offers the possibility of deciphering the neural basis of high-level cognitive tasks due to the simplicity and accessibility of the bee brain," he added.
The research has been published in the `Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences` journal.