title: Detection of bright and dim colours by honeybees.
abstract: Honeybees, Apis mellifera, were trained to detect coloured disks with either a strong or a weak intensity difference against the background. Green, blue, ultraviolet-reflecting white and grey papers were reciprocally combined as targets or backgrounds, providing strong chromatic and/or achromatic cues. The behavioural performance of the honeybees was always symmetrical for both reciprocal target/background combinations of a colour pair, thus showing that target detection is independent of whether the colour is presented as a background or as a target in combination with the other colour. Bright targets against dim backgrounds and vice versa were detected more reliably than dim target/background combinations. This result favours the general assumption that the detectability of a coloured stimulus increases with increasing intensity.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Biologie - Neurobiologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise-Strasse 28/30, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. nhempel@neurobiologie.fu-berlin.de
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hempel De Ibarra
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vorobyev
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Brandt
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Giurfa
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001516:Bees / Q000502:physiology*; D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D017956:Photoreceptor Cells, Invertebrate / Q000502:physiology; D014466:Ultraviolet Rays