Visual memories of landmarks play a major role in guiding the habitual foraging routes of ants and bees, but how these memories engage visuo-motor control systems during guidance is poorly understood. We approach this problem through a study of image matching, a navigational strategy in which insects reach a familiar place by moving so that their current retinal image transforms to match a memorized snapshot of the scene viewed from that place. Analysis of how navigating wood ants correct their course when close to a goal reveals a significant part of the mechanism underlying this transformation. Ants followed a short route to an inconspicuous feeder positioned at a fixed distance from a vertical luminance edge. They responded to an unexpected jump of the edge by turning to face the new feeder position specified by the edge. Importantly, the initial speed of the turn increased linearly with the turn's amplitude. This correlation implies that the ants' turns are driven initially by their prior calculation of the angular difference between the current retinal position of the edge and its desired position in their memorized view. Similar turns keep ants to their path during unperturbed routes. The neural circuitry mediating image-matching is thus concerned not only with the storage of views, but also with making exact comparisons between the retinal positions of a visual feature in a memorized view and of the same feature in the current retinal image.view-based-homing | snapshot | memory-retrieval | insect

Ants, like honeybees, can set their travel direction along foraging routes using just the surrounding visual panorama. This ability gives us a way to explore how visual scenes are perceived. By training wood ants to follow a path in an artificial scene and then examining their path within transformed scenes, we identify several perceptual operations that contribute to the ants' choice of direction. The first is a novel extension to the known ability of insects to compute the "center of mass" of large shapes: ants learn a desired heading toward a point on a distant shape as the proportion of the shape that lies to the left and right of the aiming point--the 'fractional position of mass' (FPM). The second operation, the extraction of local visual features like oriented edges, is familiar from studies of shape perception. Ants may use such features for guidance by keeping them in desired retinal locations. Third, ants exhibit segmentation. They compute the learned FPM over the whole of a simple scene, but over a segmented region of a complex scene. We suggest how the three operations may combine to provide efficient directional guidance.

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Since the 1970s, human subjects that have undergone corpus callosotomy have provided important insights into neural mechanisms of perception, memory, and cognition. The ability to test the function of each hemisphere independently of the other offers unique advantages for investigating systems that are thought to underlie cognition. However, such approaches have been limited to mammals. Here we describe comparable experiments on an insect brain to demonstrate learning-associated changes within one brain hemisphere. After training one half of their bisected brains, cockroaches learn to extend the antenna supplying that brain hemisphere towards an illuminated diode after this has been paired with an odor stimulus. The antenna supplying the naïve hemisphere shows no response. Cockroaches retain this ability for up to 24 h, during which, shortly after training, the mushroom body of the trained hemisphere alone undergoes specific post-translational alterations of microglomerular synaptic complexes in its calyces.

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Ants are so low to the ground that slight undulations in the terrain over which they navigate will cause large and unpredictable changes to their view of the scene around them. We describe here evidence of a form of motor learning that helps ants follow their usual route when guiding landmarks vanish from sight. Wood ants were trained to approach a vertical bar presented at varying positions on a LCD screen. In different experiments, the bar was either stationary, moved smoothly, or jumped between two stationary positions. Ants trained in these three ways followed straight, curved, or two-leg routes, respectively. Once ants were accustomed to approaching the bar from different starting points, the bar was made to disappear during their approach. Ants often continued their straight or curved or two-leg paths, despite the missing landmark, showing that they can perform complex routes with no more than intermittent visual feedback.

Animals sometimes take sinuous paths to a goal. Insects, tracking an odor trail on the ground [1-3] or moving up an odor plume in the air [4, 5], generally follow zigzag paths. Some insects [6-8] take a zigzag approach to visual targets, perhaps to obtain parallax information. How does an animal keep its overall path in the direction of the goal without disrupting a zigzag pattern? We describe here the wood ant's strategy when guided by a familiar visual scene. If their travel direction is correct, ants face the goal briefly after each turning point along their zigzag path. If the direction is wrong, they turn rapidly at this point to place the scene correctly on their retina. Such saccade-like turns are rare elsewhere in the zigzag. Similarly, when the scene is made to jump to a new position on their retina, ants wait until an expected goal-facing phase of the zigzag before turning to correct the imposed error. Correctly timed, intermittent control allows an animal to adjust its path without compromising additional roles for the zigzag pattern in gathering visual information or in using odor cues for guidance.

This review reflects a few of Mike Land's many and varied contributions to visual science. In it, we show for wood ants, as Mike has done for a variety of animals, including readers of this piece, what can be learnt from a detailed analysis of an animal's visually guided eye, head or body movements. In the case of wood ants, close examination of their body movements, as they follow visually guided routes, is starting to reveal how they perceive and respond to their visual world and negotiate a path within it. We describe first some of the mechanisms that underlie the visual control of their paths, emphasizing that vision is not the ant's only sense. In the second part, we discuss how remembered local shape-dependent and global shape-independent features of a visual scene may interact in guiding the ant's path.