Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees

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.