Neurochemical correlates of speed-accuracy trade-off during individual and social learning in honey bees

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10905-025-09869-y

Individuals learn about their environment through personal observations or by observing their social conspecifics. This results in two possible learning phenotypes – slow, accurate individual learners and fast, inaccurate social learners. While the costs and benefits of these different learning strategies are recognized, the neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie such cognitive variation remain less understood. We addressed this issue by measuring individual honey bees (Apis mellifera) for their performance on an individual and a social learning task followed by quantifying the concentrations of various neurotransmitters in their brains. Our results show that during individual learning, learning speed was associated with a positive interaction between octopamine and glutamate while learning accuracy was associated with a positive interaction between octopamine and serotonin. These patterns were exactly the opposite during social learning, where learning speed was associated with a positive interaction between octopamine and serotonin and learning accuracy was associated with a positive interaction between octopamine and serotonin. We discuss the mechanistic relevance of these patterns and the idea that mechanisms underlying social learning may be distinct from those involved in individual learning and how these differences may underlie different cognitive phenotypes that form the basis of slow-fast phenotypic differences.