Which French neuroscientist researches bee cognition including zero and addition?

The French neuroscientist who researches bee cognition, including zero and addition, is Aurore Avarguès-Weber. She is a cognitive neuroscientist and ethologist associated with the Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale in Toulouse.

Avarguès-Weber has studied how honeybees learn and represent numerical relationships despite having a very small brain. In collaborative experiments, bees learned abstract “greater than” and “less than” rules, demonstrated behavior consistent with placing an empty set below positive quantities, and solved simple addition or subtraction tasks using trained visual cues.

The zero result requires careful wording. The experiments did not show that bees understand zero as a human-written numeral. They showed that bees could treat an empty set as an ordered quantity, a capacity researchers describe as understanding the concept of zero or representing numerical absence.

Avarguès-Weber has also contributed to research on bee learning, visual discrimination and face-like patterns. The distractors in this quiz are famous animal researchers, but Grandin studies animal behavior and autism, Fossey studied gorillas, and Goodall is known chiefly for chimpanzee research.