Many animals, from insects to human beings, can learn the locations of several important sites in the environment, such as feeding places, watering holes, nests, shelters, or mating grounds. For example, foraging honey bees, like many other insects, may range widely from their nest, traveling to any of several familiar flower patches as far away as 10 kilometers. Over such a distance, the flowers and the landmarks around them cannot be seen by a bee setting out, yet the bee can find its way using familiar landmarks it sees at the starting point and along the way. Little is known about how bees learn landmarks on this scale. Equally remarkable, on returning home the bee can communicate the location of the food using the famous "dance language," a series of precise body movements observed by nestmates. The dance language itself relies on the bee's ability to learn about the landscape. A dancer indicates the angle of its flight path relative to the sun's compass direction; on cloudy days the bee can determine the direction of the unseen sun by referring to a memory, stored previously in sunny weather, of its position relative to familiar landmarks. It is still a riddle how bees form this memory in the first place, and how they update it as they encounter new landmarks or as the sun changes its pattern of movement seasonally. To study how bees use visual information stored in memory to perform these feats of orientation, Dr. Dyer will observe the responses of experienced bees when visual cues are altered in specific ways. Such experiments can reveal which of many features of the environment (e.g., the size, shape, distance, and color of landmarks, or the sun's position and rate of movement) provide spatial information to bees, how the relationships among features are remembered, how memories develop over time, and what happens to previously stored information when a bee encounters new information. Thus, the goal is to uncover general processing strategies underlying the use of visual spatial information for orientation. The visual orientation of a bee in a familiar environment is controlled by a brain little larger than the head of a pin. The larger brains of vertebrates, and especially of human beings, are obviously capable of processing that is considerably more complex. However, a difference in complexity does not necessarily imply that there is a dramatic difference in the basic neural processes. A recurrent theme in biology, in fact, is that general principles can sometimes be more easily elucidated by studying simple organisms. Hence, in addition to throwing light on how bees learn about their environment, these studies may help cognitive scientists refine their hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of spatial orientation in more complex organisms, including man.
