article_snippet: In the same way that humans sometimes remember things that didn’t actually occur, researchers have found that bees also misremember.
article_snippet: Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) tested to see if bumblebees would confuse merged versions of patterns that had previously rewarded bumblebees with food, with the ones bumblebees had actually seen.
article_snippet: bumblebees found that if bumblebees’d previously been shown a flower with black rings and then a yellow one, that bumblebees would later seek food rewards from a flower with yellow rings on it.
article_snippet: This incorrect merging of long-term memories in bumblebees is similar to some types of misremembering information that have previously only been observed in humans.
article_snippet: Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) tested to see if bumblebees would confuse merged versions of patterns that had previously rewarded them with food, with the ones they had actually seen think that such memory errors are probably common in animals whose lifestyle involves regularly juggling multiple memories.
article_snippet: ’ long-term memories in bumblebees monitored the activity of these cells when the mice explored an ‘arena’ using electrodes, isolating the cell that fired in a certain arena location.