Did you know ants have brains? It's true...they do much of what we do with only a fraction of a percentage of the resources. Ants can learn associations, navigate with both smell and visual cues, and can even recognize specific individuals in a colony. When it comes to making the most of what you're given, ants may have one of the most efficient nervous systems on the planet.
Our research serves the fields behavioral neuroscience, psychology, and entomology. We are interested in exploring learning in ants to understand how a simple nervous system learns complicated things.
Our three main research questions are:
(1) What can ants learn?
(2) How does their learning compare (qualitatively and quantitatively) with other animals?
(3) How do they do it with so few neurons?