The phenomenon at the heart of the study is called latent learning, a concept with a storied history in psychology. Unlike classical conditioning or trial-and-error learning, latent learning requires no immediate payoff. Information about the environment is acquired and stored quietly during mere exposure, remaining invisible until a relevant incentive appears and suddenly reveals that the animal had been paying attention all along. The idea was famously demonstrated in the early twentieth century by Edward Tolman and colleagues, who showed that rats allowed to wander a maze unrewarded later performed nearly as well as rats trained with food rewards once food was finally introduced.

Latent learning has since been documented in humans, fish, and other vertebrates, and modern neuroscientists often connect it to the construction of cognitive maps, internal representations of spatial relationships that allow flexible navigation. Insects, with brains containing far fewer neurons than a rat’s, have historically been viewed as less likely candidates for such sophisticated learning, although decades of research on bee and ant navigation have steadily eroded that assumption. Desert ants, for example, learn visual landmarks during elaborate learning flights and walks, and honeybees integrate multiple navigational cues into surprisingly robust guidance systems. Whether unrewarded exploration genuinely improves later foraging performance in ants, however, remained a question in need of direct experimental testing.

Bastien Wagner of Sorbonne Paris Nord University and the University of Strasbourg, working with Patrizia d’Ettorre and István E. Maák, designed an elegantly simple experiment to address that gap. Their subject, Aphaenogaster senilis, is a ground-dwelling species that forages in open, sunny habitats where food resources appear unpredictably in space and time. That ecological context matters: when a scout cannot rely on predictable resource locations, any mechanism that extracts useful information from routine exploration could confer a substantial survival advantage, turning aimless wandering into a form of low-cost reconnaissance.

The team compared two groups of ants navigating an artificial maze to reach food. One group, the experienced ants, had previously been allowed to explore the very same maze when it was completely empty, with no food anywhere in it and no reward waiting at the end. The other group, the controls, encountered the maze for the first time only when food was present. If the ants were learning nothing during their unrewarded exposure, both groups should have performed identically once food appeared. Instead, the experienced ants located the food significantly faster than their naive nestmates, exactly the pattern predicted if they had absorbed spatial information during their earlier, reward-free visits.

The differences did not end at food discovery. After finding food for the first time, experienced ants also returned to the nest more rapidly than control ants. This second result is particularly revealing, because it shows that the benefits of prior exposure extended beyond simply finding the reward. An ant that knows the maze’s layout does not need to retrace or stumble through it when the goal shifts from food to home. The knowledge acquired during unrewarded exploration, in other words, was later deployed for flexible, goal-directed behavior, which is precisely the functional signature that defines latent learning rather than simpler stimulus-response habits.

The researchers then asked a subtler question about the individual ants themselves. Among the ants placed in the maze, some solved it and some did not, and the team wanted to know whether these successful navigators differed in their general behavioral style. Using an open-field test, a standard assay originally developed to measure exploration and anxiety-like behavior, they characterized the exploratory activity of each ant. The outcome was counterintuitive: the ants that managed to solve the maze were actually less exploratory in the open field than those that failed. Rather than the boldest adventurers being the best navigators, the more cautious individuals appeared to be the ones that cracked the spatial puzzle.

The authors interpret this pattern as a potential example of a speed-accuracy trade-off, a well-known concept in behavioral ecology describing how fast decisions often come at the cost of precision, while careful, deliberate processing yields better accuracy. Highly exploratory ants may rush through environments, sampling widely but shallowly, whereas less exploratory individuals may attend more closely to spatial details as they move. Similar results have emerged in earlier work on social insects, including studies reporting that highly active explorer ants show poorer learning performance, suggesting that a trade-off between exploration and careful information acquisition may be a recurring theme in insect cognition.

The study also adds to a growing appreciation of inter-individual variability in insect societies. Ant colonies have long been treated as superorganisms in which workers are interchangeable cogs, but research over the past two decades has revealed consistent personality-like differences among individuals in exploration, boldness, sucrose responsiveness, and task specialization. These differences can matter at the colony level; diverse colonies have been shown to be more productive in some contexts. In the case of A. senilis, a colony containing a mixture of cautious spatial learners and restless explorers may be ideally configured, with one subset solving navigational problems efficiently while the other scouts broadly for novel opportunities.

The broader implications reach into one of the liveliest debates in animal cognition: whether insects possess cognitive maps, internal spatial representations that permit novel shortcuts and flexible route planning, or whether their navigation relies on collections of simpler guidance modules such as path integration, landmark matching, and scene familiarity. Proponents of the cognitive map hypothesis point to findings like these as evidence that unrewarded experience builds genuine spatial knowledge, while critics urge caution in attributing map-like representations without stronger tests of flexible shortcutting. What the new results establish firmly, independent of that debate, is that ants benefit cognitively from exploration alone, without reinforcement, and that this benefit translates directly into measurable foraging efficiency. For an animal whose fitness depends on shuttling calories back to a colony, the ability to bank spatial information during every uneventful walk may be one of evolution’s quietest but most valuable bargains, hidden in plain sight until the moment a reward appears and the memory shows its worth.

Subject of Research: Latent learning and foraging efficiency in the ant Aphaenogaster senilis

Article Title: Latent learning improves foraging efficiency in ants

Article References: Wagner, B., d’Ettorre, P., & Maák, I. E. (2026). Latent learning improves foraging efficiency in ants. The Science of Nature, 113(5), Article 112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-026-02163-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00114-026-02163-7

Keywords: latent learning, ants, Aphaenogaster senilis, foraging, navigation, maze learning, spatial learning, insect cognition, behavioral ecology, exploratory activity, speed-accuracy trade-off, animal personality

The research, conducted by Chang S. Han of Kyung Hee University and LMU Munich, Cristina Tuni of LMU Munich and the University of Turin, and Niels J. Dingemanse of the University of Turin, focused on male two-spotted field crickets, Gryllus bimaculatus, drawn from a pedigreed laboratory population. The pedigree is crucial. Because the relatedness of every individual in the population is known, the researchers could apply quantitative genetic techniques, including animal model analyses, to separate the genetic contribution to behaviour from environmental effects. This allowed them to ask not merely whether the correlation between aggression and exploration declines with age, but whether the genetic underpinning of that correlation does too, and if so, why.

The behaviours in question are staples of personality research. Aggression was measured through staged contests in which males fought one another, with researchers scoring the intensity and outcome of each interaction. Exploration was assessed by observing how readily individuals moved through and investigated novel environments. Both are labile traits, meaning they can change from moment to moment, yet individuals differ consistently from one another in their typical expression. In this population, more aggressive males also tended to be more exploratory, producing a positive among-individual correlation of the kind documented across fishes, birds, mammals and insects, and central to the pace-of-life syndrome framework, which links behavioural types to differences in growth, reproduction and lifespan.

The study’s central finding is that this positive correlation, robust across the nymphal and young adult stages, steadily eroded as males aged through adulthood. At first glance, this pattern might suggest a simple developmental story: perhaps the developmental processes that synchronise aggression and exploration early in life simply dissolve over time. But the quantitative genetic analysis revealed something more intricate. The genetic correlation between the two behaviours, an estimate of the extent to which the same genes influence both traits, followed a parallel trajectory, remaining strong in early stages and weakening significantly in older adults. Crucially, the researchers found no evidence that short-term permanent environmental correlations were responsible for the observed age-related change. The similarity between the among-individual and genetic patterns pointed instead to causes operating at the level of genes and selection.

The first such cause is survival selection, a form of natural selection in which an individual’s phenotype determines whether it lives long enough to appear in the older age classes. In this population, selection at the young adult stage tended to favour less explorative males, meaning that highly exploratory individuals were disproportionately likely to die before reaching later ages. Because exploration was genetically linked to aggression, the selective removal of certain exploratory genotypes dragged the aggression-exploration correlation along with it. As the composition of surviving genotypes shifted with age, the tight coupling between the two behaviours weakened. This is a mechanism familiar from evolutionary genetics: selection on one trait can reshape the genetic architecture of correlated traits, and when selection is age-specific, that reshaping unfolds along the lifespan.

The second mechanism is arguably more surprising: genetic variation in age-related behavioural plasticity, sometimes described through genotype-by-age interactions. Different genotypes, the researchers found, do not all change their exploratory behaviour at the same rate as they age. Some genotypes maintain high exploration into old age, while others decline earlier or follow entirely different trajectories. This heritable variation in the age-specific expression of exploration meant that the genetic relationships among individuals were not fixed across the lifespan. As genotypes diverged in their ageing patterns, the genetic correlation between aggression and exploration diminished, independently of whether any individual survived or died. In other words, the genetic architecture of behaviour is itself dynamic, and genes that bind two traits together at one age may loosen their grip at another.

The significance of these findings extends well beyond crickets. Behavioural syndromes are widely regarded as evolutionary constraints: when the same genes influence multiple traits, selection cannot freely optimise one trait without dragging the other along. This idea has been formalised in models showing that behavioural correlations can slow or redirect adaptive evolution, and empirical work in wild birds, marmots, fishes and insects has repeatedly documented heritable correlations among personality traits. Yet most such studies capture a snapshot, typically of adult animals of unspecified or unremarked age. The new results warn that such snapshots may be misleading. A genetic correlation measured in young adults may overstate the constraint operating in older individuals, and predictions of evolutionary response that ignore age structure may therefore be systematically wrong.

The study also connects to a broader literature on the evolutionary genetics of ageing. Research on wild passerine birds, swans, houbara bustards and other organisms has shown that genetic variances and covariances of traits can change with age, consistent with theoretical predictions from mutation-accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy theories of senescence. Previous work, including studies reporting that strong genetic correlations underlying behavioural syndromes disappear during development through genotype-age interactions, hinted at the kind of dynamics now documented in crickets. What distinguishes the new research is its explicit attempt to weigh competing mechanisms against one another within a single pedigreed population. By jointly estimating genetic correlations, age-related plasticity and survival selection, the authors demonstrated that age-related change in behavioural architecture is a multi-causal phenomenon, produced by both the selective sorting of genotypes and the age-dependent expression of behaviour within genotypes.

For evolutionary biologists, the practical message is that age must enter the models. Quantitative geneticists have developed powerful tools, notably the animal model, to partition phenotypic variance into additive genetic and environmental components, and these tools can now be extended to ask how the entire genetic covariance matrix, often abbreviated as the G-matrix, transforms across the lifespan. The cricket results suggest that the G-matrix is not a static property of a population but a moving target, reshaped continuously by mortality and by the plastic, genotype-specific unfolding of behaviour over time. Studies of morphological integration and developmental modularity have made similar arguments for structural traits; this work brings labile behavioural traits squarely into that conversation.

For anyone who has watched a young animal grow calmer, slower or more predictable with age, the findings offer a mechanistic explanation grounded in genetics and selection. The personalities we observe are not engraved once at birth and fixed forever; they are the output of genes whose effects shift as organisms age, filtered by the unforgiving arithmetic of survival. As highly exploratory crickets are weeded out and as different genotypes age along different behavioural paths, the once-tight bonds between boldness and aggression loosen. What looks like the mellowing of old age is, at the genetic level, a population’s architecture being rewritten. Understanding that rewriting, the authors argue, is essential if we hope to predict how animal populations will respond to selection in a changing world, one behavioural correlation at a time.

Subject of Research: Age-related changes in genetic correlations between aggression and exploration in male field crickets

Article Title: Selection and genetic variation in age-related plasticity drive the erosion of among-individual behavioural correlations in later life

Article References: Han, C. S., Tuni, C., & Dingemanse, N. J. (2026). Selection and genetic variation in age-related plasticity drive the erosion of among-individual behavioural correlations in later life. Heredity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-026-00884-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41437-026-00884-z

Keywords: behavioural syndromes, animal personality, genetic correlation, age-related plasticity, survival selection, genotype-by-age interactions, quantitative genetics, field crickets, Gryllus bimaculatus, pace-of-life syndrome, aggression, exploration