Is pattern vision in insects mediated by 'cortical' processing?

Srinivasan, M. V.; Sw, Zhang; Rolfe, Bernard

doi:10.1038/362539a0

Cited by 77 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…For example, honeybees can extract pattern features for use as spatial references (Srinivasan et al, 1993), and hymenopteran insects can use contrasts for edge and pattern detection (Lehrer et al, 1990;Kern et al, 1997;Pratt et al, 2001). Quantitative documentation of the visual environment of relevant habitat, e.g.…”

Section: Adaptive Significance and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The visual ecology of directed aerial descent in first-instar nymphs of the stick insectExtatosoma tiaratum

Zeng

Lin

Abundo

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Many wingless insects perform directed aerial descent (DAD) to return to vegetational structures after falling. Given the complex visual environment and spatial structures of tree canopies, those visual signals used as directional cues are not fully understood. Here, we address the role of visual contrast for DAD in newly hatched nymphs of the stick insect Extatosoma tiaratum under controlled laboratory conditions. Landing preferences of gliding E. tiaratum in various visual environments were studied. We used a single vertical stripe defined by variable contrast edges to test the use of contrast consistency and sharpness. We also used aggregate patterns to examine the effects of target size and the effectiveness of luminance contrast and chromatic contrast. E. tiaratum nymphs were attracted to single stripes with welldefined edges, and particularly favored narrow dark targets. The directionality and accuracy of landing were dependent on target size. Lastly, luminance contrasts were more effective in attracting landings than were chromatic contrasts. Visual contrasts are therefore used as spatial references for landing behavior in DAD. These behaviors may enable nymphs to quickly locate dark or shaded sides of vertically oriented vegetation in natural habitats.

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Section: Adaptive Significance and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The visual ecology of directed aerial descent in first-instar nymphs of the stick insectExtatosoma tiaratum

Zeng

Lin

Abundo

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…If the food source is surrounded by an array of landmarks, information about landmarks close to the goal is more important than information about more distant ones (Cheng et al, 1987). Other cues like shape, edge orientation and symmetry (van Hateren et al, 1990;Srinivasan et al, 1993;Giurfa et al, 1996), which are involved in pattern discrimination, might also be relevant to spatial navigation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Goal seeking in honeybees: matching of optic flow snapshots?

Dittmar

Stürzl

Baird

et al. 2010

Journal of Experimental Biology

128

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SUMMARYVisual landmarks guide humans and animals including insects to a goal location. Insects, with their miniature brains, have evolved a simple strategy to find their nests or profitable food sources; they approach a goal by finding a close match between the current view and a memorised retinotopic representation of the landmark constellation around the goal. Recent implementations of such a matching scheme use raw panoramic images ('image matching') and show that it is well suited to work on robots and even in natural environments. However, this matching scheme works only if relevant landmarks can be detected by their contrast and texture. Therefore, we tested how honeybees perform in localising a goal if the landmarks can hardly be distinguished from the background by such cues. We recorded the honeybees' flight behaviour with high-speed cameras and compared the search behaviour with computer simulations. We show that honeybees are able to use landmarks that have the same contrast and texture as the background and suggest that the bees use relative motion cues between the landmark and the background. These cues are generated on the eyes when the bee moves in a characteristic way in the vicinity of the landmarks. This extraordinary navigation performance can be explained by a matching scheme that includes snapshots based on optic flow amplitudes ('optic flow matching'). This new matching scheme provides a robust strategy for navigation, as it depends primarily on the depth structure of the environment.Supplementary material available online at http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/213/17/2913/DC1 Key words: honeybee, landmark navigation, snapshot matching, vision. THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY 2914be unnecessary (Zeil et al., 2003;Stürzl and Zeil, 2007). Zeil et al. show that the similarities between panoramic images of natural environments decrease smoothly with spatial distance between an observer and the goal location (Zeil et al., 2003). An animal that is sensitive to the similarity of views relative to the memorised view of the goal location could return to this location by maximising the similarities between images [modelled by simple image similarity gradient methods (Zeil et al., 2003)]. Thus, panoramic image similarities can be used for view-based homing in natural environments. Recently, the behaviour of ants and crickets in goal-finding tasks could be explained by 'image matching ' (Wystrach and Beugnon, 2009;Mangan and Webb, 2009).In our combined behavioural and modelling approach, we tested the content of the spatial memory in honeybees during complex navigational tasks. Honeybees were trained to locate an inconspicuous feeder surrounded by three cylinders, which we refer to as landmarks. By altering the spatial configuration and landmark texture and monitoring the approach flights to the feeder, we addressed the following questions: what role does the spatial configuration of the landmarks play? Does landmark texture play a role in navigational tasks? In particular, can landmarks b...

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“…Recent work has revealed that honey bees can be trained to distinguish between patterns on the basis of general characteristics such as orientation (6)(7)(8) and symmetry (9). However, the visual form primitives for small creatures, like bees, remain an unsolved mystery.…”

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confidence: 99%

Global perception in small brains: Topological pattern recognition in honey bees

Chen

Zhang

Srinivasan

2003

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A series of experiments with honey bees demonstrate that their small brains nevertheless possess the ability for topological perception. Bees rapidly learned to discriminate patterns that are topologically different, and they generalized the learned cue to other novel patterns. By contrast, discrimination of topologically equivalent patterns was learned much more slowly and not as well. Thus, although the global nature of topological properties makes their computation difficult, topology may be a fundamental component of the vocabulary by which visual systems represent and characterize objects.

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Is pattern vision in insects mediated by 'cortical' processing?

Cited by 77 publications

References 13 publications

The visual ecology of directed aerial descent in first-instar nymphs of the stick insectExtatosoma tiaratum

The visual ecology of directed aerial descent in first-instar nymphs of the stick insectExtatosoma tiaratum

Goal seeking in honeybees: matching of optic flow snapshots?

Global perception in small brains: Topological pattern recognition in honey bees

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