Intramodal competition for attention in honeybees

Honeybees were trained to discriminate between targets varying in color and length, one dimension relevant and the other irrelevant. Performance in acquisition was better when the pairs of targets presented on each trial differed only in the relevant dimension than when they differed in both, suggesting that difference in the irrelevant dimension promoted attention to the irrelevant stimuli at the expense of attention to the relevant stimuli. Subsequent performance in an unreinforced choice test was also better when the targets differed only in the relevant dimension rather than in both dimensions. The results are considered in relation to those of previous experiments with honeybees that point to attentional effects in the conditioning of intramodal but not of intermodal compounds.