Some social wasps recognise each other’s faces and memorise information about the status of other individuals; such information can be acquired through observing interactions between familiar individuals and might involve transitive inference

Social cognition in insects. Lars Chittka, Natacha Rossi. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, May 12, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.04.001

Highlights

Some social wasps recognise each other’s faces and memorise information about the status of other individuals; such information can be acquired through observing interactions between familiar individuals and might involve transitive inference.

Bumblebees can learn simple ‘tool use’ techniques by observing skilled conspecifics and such techniques can spread through entire colonies in a process akin to cultural diffusion of novel innovations.

Female fruit flies copy mate preferences from other females and such preferences might be maintained over generations via conformity bias.

Given these forms of advanced social cognition in insects, we suggest investigating whether the elaborate architectures of social insect colonies might in part be the result of cultural evolution processes, even possibly in the distant past.

Abstract: Insects feature some of the most complex societies in the animal kingdom, but a historic perception persists that such complexity emerges from interactions between individuals whose behaviours are largely guided by innate routines. Challenging this perception, recent work shows that insects feature many aspects of social intelligence found in vertebrate societies, such as individual recognition, learning object manipulation by observation, and elements of cultural traditions. Insects also display emotion-like states, which may be linked to social behaviours such as rescuing others from danger. We review recent developments in insect social cognition and speculate that some forms of now-hardwired behaviour (e.g., nest construction) could have initially been the result of individual innovation and subsequent cultural spread, with evolution later cementing these behaviours into innate behaviour routines.