Possible evidence for the Law of General Intelligence in honeybees (Apis mellifera)

Abstract

Finke, Scheiner, Giurfa, and Avarguès-Weber (2023) published correlational data on the performance of honeybees (Apis mellifera) in three learning tasks (associative, reversal, and negative patterning, capturing the domains of operant conditioning, executive-functioning-like ability, and inhibition plus configural processing, respectively) evaluated under both visual and olfactory stimulus conditions. They speculate that general cognitive ability (GCA) may be weakly causing all-positive correlations between performance in these different learning modalities, but do not formally test this possibility. A factor-analytic model applied to Finke et al. (2023) data revealed the presence of two perfectly congruent GCA factors (one for each stimulus condition). Both exhibited all-positive loadings, with the visual factor accounting for 46.8% of the performance variance and the olfactory factor accounting for 52.3%. Diagnostic statistics confirmed that in both stimulus conditions, the correlation matrices were adequate for factor analysis. These findings support extant hypotheses that GCA influences covariation between cognitive measures in honeybees, and constitute the first formal potential demonstration of GCA in an invertebrate. It is argued that GCA might be ubiquitous with respect to metazoans possessing organized nervous systems, perhaps because it convergently evolved multiple times in independent phylogenies, this being a key prediction of Christopher Chabris' Law of General Intelligence. Indeed, GCA has now been identified in insect, avian, mammal, and fish taxa. Some “primordial” aspects of GCA may even by basal to metazoans, and experiments employing Caenorhabditis elegans are suggested that could potentially shed light on such aspects. The findings are also strikingly inconsistent with evolutionary and comparative psychological theories positing a “modules first” understanding of cognitive evolution, such as one recent proposal that smaller brains cannot accommodate structures that give rise to GCA. Other theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.