大黄蜂具有利用视觉和触觉感官之间交叉模式来识别对象的能力，这一成果由伦敦玛丽女王大学Cwyn Solvi小组经过不懈努力而取得。该研究于2020年2月21日发表在《科学》杂志上。

研究人员发现，经过训练只能使用触摸（在黑暗中）或视觉（在光线下，但禁止触摸物体）来区分两个不同形状物体（立方体和球形）的大黄蜂随后可以仅使用其它感官信息来区分相同的物体。 该实验表明，大黄蜂具有利用与感觉模式无关内部识别的方式来整合感觉信息的能力。

据了解，许多动物都可以将物体的形状与奖励因素联系起来。但是，这样的行为无需将形状图像存储在大脑中，因为大脑可获得多个感觉模式。探索对象形状是否存在与模式无关的内部识别方式的一种方法是研究交叉模式识别，即在一种感觉模式中体验一个对象，然后在另一种感觉模式中对其进行识别。

附：英文原文

Title: Bumble bees display cross-modal object recognition between visual and tactile senses

Author: Cwyn Solvi, Selene Gutierrez Al-Khudhairy, Lars Chittka

Issue&Volume: 2020/02/21

Abstract: AbstractMany animals can associate object shapes with incentives. However, such behavior is possible without storing images of shapes in memory that are accessible to more than one sensory modality. One way to explore whether there are modality-independent internal representations of object shapes is to investigate cross-modal recognition—experiencing an object in one sensory modality and later recognizing it in another. We show that bumble bees trained to discriminate two differently shaped objects (cubes and spheres) using only touch (in darkness) or vision (in light, but barred from touching the objects) could subsequently discriminate those same objects using only the other sensory information. Our experiments demonstrate that bumble bees possess the ability to integrate sensory information in a way that requires modality-independent internal representations.

DOI: 10.1126/science.aay8064

Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6480/910