The findings suggest that the capacity for complex behavior may be shaped by the social environment in which behaviors are beneficial, rather than being strictly limited by brain size.
SCIENCE DAILY: ‘A new University of Michigan study provides the first evidence of transitive inference, the ability to use known relationships to infer unknown relationships, in a non-vertebrate animal: the lowly paper wasp. For millennia, transitive inference was considered a hallmark of human deductive powers, a form of logical reasoning used to make inferences: If A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C. But in recent decades, vertebrate animals including monkeys, birds and fish have demonstrated the ability to use transitive inference…
More recently, some researchers have questioned whether TI requires higher-order reasoning or can be solved with simpler rules… Paper wasps have a nervous system roughly the same size — about one million neurons — as honeybees, but they exhibit a type complex social behavior not seen in honeybee colonies. University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts wondered if paper wasps’ social skills could enable them to succeed where honeybees had failed…
“This study adds to a growing body of evidence that the miniature nervous systems of insects do not limit sophisticated behaviors,” said Tibbetts, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “We’re not saying that wasps used logical deduction to solve this problem, but they seem to use known relationships to make inferences about unknown relationships,” Tibbetts said. “Our findings suggest that the capacity for complex behavior may be shaped by the social environment in which behaviors are beneficial, rather than being strictly limited by brain size”.’ SOURCE…
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