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Exploring dimensions of consciousness in honey bees: awareness and emotion-like states| title | Exploring dimensions of consciousness in honey bees: awareness and emotion-like states |
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| start_date | 2026/04/16 |
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| schedule | 15h-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle de conférence de l'IHPST |
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| summary | Whether non-human animals, and particularly invertebrates, possess components of consciousness remains a central and controversial question. The honey bee (Apis mellifera), an insect with sophisticated cognitive abilities, provides a powerful model to address this issue experimentally. In my PhD thesis, I investigated whether honey bees exhibit two key dimensions often associated with consciousness: awareness and emotion-like central states. To assess awareness, we examined olfactory trace conditioning, a learning paradigm that requires maintaining a stimulus representation across a temporal gap and, which in humans, depends on awareness. Bees successfully learned both delay and trace odor–sugar associations, but trace conditioning led to weaker acquisition and memory. Crucially, trace, but not delay, conditioning was selectively disrupted by visual and mechanosensory distractors and by pharmacological blockade of serotonergic signaling. A computational model of the bee olfactory network supported the role of serotonin in bridging temporal gaps, indicating a selective engagement of higher-order cognitive processes under temporal uncertainty. Increasing task demands using olfactory reversal learning further revealed that distractors differentially impaired performance in delay and trace paradigms, consistent with disrupted attentional reallocation and contingency awareness during trace learning. To investigate emotion-like states, we studied bees subjected to aversive conditioning. Bees that learned to associate a visual cue with an electric shock displayed coordinated behavioral, physiological, and neurochemical changes upon perceiving the shock-predictive stimulus. Specifically, they expressed reduced locomotion, increased thigmotaxis, elevated respiration and body temperature, and modified biogenic amine levels in brain tissues in anticipation of the shock. These convergent and consistent responses suggest an integrative internal state analogous to fear. Together, these findings provide converging evidence that honey bees engage awareness-like mechanisms and exhibit emotion-like central states, suggesting that core features of consciousness may have deeper evolutionary origins than previously assumed. |
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| responsibles | Moullard, Athéa |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2026/04/03 12:17 UTC |
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