Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees
Summary
Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form robust abstract rhythm representations. Free-flying bees learned to discriminate two arbitrary repeating flashing light sequences, balanced to preclude the use of any local cues. Bees successfully recognized these learned rhythmic patterns at new, faster, and slower tempi. Bees trained on vibr
Content
# Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees
*Published: 2026 Apr 2*
Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech,
but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this
work, we show that bumble bees also form robust abstract rhythm representations.
Free-flying bees learned to discriminate two arbitrary repeating flashing light
sequences, balanced to preclude the use of any local cues. Bees successfully
recognized these learned rhythmic patterns at new, faster, and slower tempi.
Bees trained on vibrational patterns transferred their learning to equivalent
flashing light patterns, demonstrating cross-modal rhythm perception. These
findings suggest that an insect brain can encode and generalize arbitrary
complex temporal patterns, which suggests that abstract rhythm perception can
emerge from relatively simple neural architectures and points to deep
evolutionary roots for a domain-general rhythm cognition across animals.
DOI: 10.1126/science.adz2894