The ability of developing complex internal representations of the visual environment is crucial to the emergence of humans’ higher cognitive functions. Yet it is an open question whether there is any fundamental difference in how humans and other good visual learner species naturally encode aspects of novel visual scenes. We investigated how honeybees encode instinctively various statistical properties of different visual scenes presented in sequence. While after limited exposure, bees became sensitive to statistics of only elemental features (e.g. frequency of A) of the scenes, with more experience, they shifted to relying on co-occurrence frequencies of elements (frequency of AB) and lost their sensitivity to elemental frequencies. However the bees failed to show sensitivity to conditional probabilities (if A then B) contrarily to humans. Thus, humans’ intrinsic sensitivity to predictive information might be a fundamental prerequisite of developing higher cognitive abilities.

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