[25/06/2025] Informatics PhD student Anna Hadjitofi supervised by Professor Barbara Webb, won the Glushko Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation in cognitive science, awarded for her thesis “Neural mechanisms of dance communication in honeybees”. Honeybees’ waggle dance Anna’s thesis concerns a remarkable ability of honeybees to communicate through a waggle dance, whereby a bee that has found food performs a dance inside the hive to signal its location. The direction of the dancer's movement relative to gravity on the vertical honeycomb tells other bees where to find the food relative to the sun, and its duration correlates with the distance to the food. Although scientists have known about the waggle dance for a long time, the details of the underlying mechanisms in the brain remain poorly understood. For example, how nestmates observe and translate the dancer's movements into a flight path they can use to find the food is unknown. Anna’s project used a computational approach to investigate how neural circuits in the bee brain could produce and interpret the waggle dance. The research focuses on the involvement of a region of the insect brain called the central complex, which is known to be a centre for navigational processing. Anna’s work implements computer simulations of this neural circuit and compares their behaviour to real-world observations. Interpretation of the dance The research first demonstrated how properties of the central complex brain region that underlie large-scale navigation could be adapted to perform the dance within the hive, as a miniature re-enactment of the original foraging trip. Following this, using high-speed high-resolution cameras, the researchers filmed bees observing dances and uncovered how the movements of the dancer could be sensed by other bees through the positioning of their antennae to deduce the signalled direction of the food. The researchers then proposed how the central complex could process this antennal positioning, along with the bee's knowledge of its own orientation relative to gravity, to obtain a flight path to the food. Tracking the flight pattern Finally, they conducted a novel experiment to measure how accurately bees' have estimated the signalled location after observing a dance. Using real data from tracked bees as input to the proposed model, they obtain predictions for the flight paths of bees recruited to a food source. Both the model's predictions and experimental results show a similar pattern: recruited bees would be scattered in a wide, fan-shaped vicinity of the food source. These findings suggest the dance provides an approximate location of the food rather than pinpoint accuracy. Repurposing of navigational mechanisms The thesis shows how neurobiological properties of the same circuit could accommodate key aspects of the honeybee dance communication, including a forager performing the dance and a nestmate translating the dance into their own flight path. Although the waggle dance is a unique form of location-sharing that is not known to exist in any other insect, the results suggest that it could arise from the repurposing of existing navigational mechanisms and neural circuitry that is common across the insect world. I am truly grateful and honoured to receive the Glushko Dissertation Prize. The honeybee waggle dance is one of the most fascinating examples of communication in the natural world.This research was a journey into understanding how their tiny brains could perform such a complex task, and it’s incredible to think that the same neural circuits they use for navigating the world could be repurposed for this unique ‘dance language’.I would like to sincerely thank Professor Barbara Webb for her guidance, and acknowledge the collaborative spirit of the informatics field that made this work possible. Anna Hadjitofi PhD student, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh Glushko Dissertation Prizes Up to five Robert J. Glushko Dissertation/Ph.D. Thesis Prizes in Cognitive Science will be awarded annually. Each prize is accompanied by a certificate and a $10,000 award to be used by the recipient without any constraints. Prize winners also receive three years of complimentary membership in the Cognitive Science Society starting with the year in which they have won the prize. Prize-winning dissertations/Ph.D. theses are expected to transcend any one of the individual fields comprising cognitive science. They should centrally address issues of interest to multiple fields that comprise cognitive science, including: psychology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and education. Robert J. Glushko is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in 1979 under David Rumelhart’s supervision. He is an Adjunct Full Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Related links Link to Anna’s personal website Glushko Dissertation Prize Tags 2025 Research Student Publication date 25 Jun, 2025
