Biological Cybernetics

Since flowers combine visual and olfactory cues, honeybees show robust and reliable learning behaviour to stimuli of either one of modalities. However, the neuronal percept of a flower includes cross-modal interactions that lead to a combination of both modalities. This so-called multi-modal integration is what we aim to understand. In this project, we train bees to an olfactory-visual compound stimulus and compare the bee’s neural processing to the processing of single stimulus components (light and odour) at different brain levels.