Discrimination of complex textures by bees

A problem confronted by visual systems is that of discriminating textures. It appears that a recently described class of orientation-tuned neurones in the bee brain embody properties of mechanisms used by humans to discriminate complex textures. In particular these mechanisms would permit bees to discriminate a large range of textures by giving bees access to information related to higher-order correlations between texture elements. To determine if bees can exploit such textural information we have conducted behavioural experiments employing iso-dipole textures, that statistically speaking, differ from binary noise textures, and each other, only in their third-order correlation functions. While these textures are not themselves of any ethological significance their special properties permit us to show that bees can potentially use a very large palette of textures to classify textured objects. In electrophysiological experiments we demonstrate the requisite contrast sign invariance (rectification) of the orientation-selective neurones' responses and discuss other similarities of these neurones' responses to models accounting for human texture discrimination. Accepted: 7 October 1998