Modelos de transferencia de información en abejas eusociales

CORTI BIELSA, GONZALO; SEGURA, E; FARINA WM

Huerta Grande

Taller; II Reunión Conjunta de Neurociencias; 2010

Honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies are subjects of interest for studying dynamic social networks in a real world. This is because their collective-decision making are consequence of diverse and sophisticated communication mechanisms together with local interactions (trophallactic-food exchanges) that allow a fast propagation of food-related information among several individuals. Additionally, honeybees are organized by an extraordinarily tuned division of labor that depends on age polyethism. Thus, young worker bees located far from the information centers of the colony can access and store for long periods information about the different resources exploited by older workers. Although theoretical models address the relevance of these social interactions in the foraging context, it has been ignored the role of cognitive processes in such collective and dynamic phenomenon. The purpose of our project concerns the integration of these aspects: the establishment of social information via local interaction together with the movements of individuals from peripheral to central locations during their development as bee workers. With artificial neural networks as our conceptual framework, the goal is to model certain forms of individual experience and generate a plausible structure of a dynamic social network during resource exploitation. We will show our preliminary results, in which we used a first generation Rescorla-Wagner model in a demographically structured population