Visual search in barn owls: Task difficulty and saccadic behavior

Orlowski, Julius; Ben-Shahar, Ohad; Wagner, Hermann

doi:10.1167/18.1.4

Cited by 32 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Since there is an enormous evolutionary distance between humans and archerfish, and given similar findings in other vertebrates such as barn owls (Harmening, Orlowski, Ben-Shahar, & Wagner, 2011;Orlowski et al, 2015;Orlowski, Ben-Shahar, & Wagner, 2018), rats (Botly & De Rosa, 2011), and pigeons (P. M. Blough, 1984), we speculate that these four features are processed equally efficiently in vertebrates in general.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

“…For example, studies on barn owls (Harmening et al, 2011;Orlowski et al, 2015) show that orientation and luminance contrast elicit the parallel search mode in these birds. More recently, a low-contrast feature task and two conjunction tasks involving both high-and low-contrast orientation have demonstrated serial search in this species (Orlowski et al, 2018). Studies on pigeons, on the other hand, have demonstrated that shapes (D.S.…”

Section: Parallel and Serial Visual Search Across Vertebratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What pops out for you pops out for fish: Four common visual features

et al. 2019

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Visual search is the ability to detect a target of interest against a background of distracting objects. For many animals, performing this task fast and accurately is crucial for survival. Typically, visual-search performance is measured by the time it takes the observer to detect a target against a backdrop of distractors. The efficiency of a visual search depends fundamentally on the features of the target, the distractors, and the interaction between them. Substantial efforts have been devoted to investigating the influence of different visual features on visual-search performance in humans. In particular, it has been demonstrated that color, size, orientation, and motion are efficient visual features to guide attention in humans. However, little is known about which features are efficient and which are not in other vertebrates. Given earlier observations that moving targets elicit popout and parallel search in the archerfish during visualsearch tasks, here we investigate and confirm that all four of these visual features also facilitate efficient search in the archerfish in a manner comparable to humans. In conjunction with results reported for other species, these finding suggest universality in the way visual search is carried out by animals despite very different brain anatomies and living environments.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Section: Parallel and Serial Visual Search Across Vertebratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What pops out for you pops out for fish: Four common visual features

et al. 2019

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“…Other taxa have also been trained on visual search tasks, including recent work with barn owls [ 142 , 143 ] ( Tyto alba ), zebrafish [ 144 ] ( Danio rerio ), and bumblebees [ 145 ] ( Bombus terrestris ). The latter study conditioned bees to associate specific colours with rewards, which they could detect in arrays of distractor colours.…”

Section: Literature Review: Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affect-Driven Attention Biases as Animal Welfare Indicators: Review and Methods

Crump

Arnott

Bethell

2018

Animals

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Simple SummaryGood animal welfare requires minimizing suffering and promoting positive experiences. To achieve this, we need reliable indicators of animals’ psychological states. In humans, different moods and emotions (“affects”) are associated with changes in visual attention (“attention bias”). We review studies investigating whether attention biases are also indicators of affect in animals. Although research is limited, evidence for affect-driven attention biases has been found in several species, especially primates and livestock. These studies are discussed in relation to tasks developed for measuring attention in humans. We identify additional findings from human psychology that might be applied to animals, particularly species not studied before, and conclude that affect-driven attention bias is a promising welfare indicator. However, it may be more useful for studying responses to specific stimuli, rather than general wellbeing. With further study, we hope these findings contribute to fulfilling society’s ethical obligations towards animals.AbstractAttention bias describes the differential allocation of attention towards one stimulus compared to others. In humans, this bias can be mediated by the observer’s affective state and is implicated in the onset and maintenance of affective disorders such as anxiety. Affect-driven attention biases (ADABs) have also been identified in a few other species. Here, we review the literature on ADABs in animals and discuss their utility as welfare indicators. Despite a limited research effort, several studies have found that negative affective states modulate attention to negative (i.e., threatening) cues. ADABs influenced by positive-valence states have also been documented in animals. We discuss methods for measuring ADAB and conclude that looking time, dot-probe, and emotional spatial cueing paradigms are particularly promising. Research is needed to test them with a wider range of species, investigate attentional scope as an indicator of affect, and explore the possible causative role of attention biases in determining animal wellbeing. Finally, we argue that ADABs might not be best-utilized as indicators of general valence, but instead to reveal specific emotions, motivations, aversions, and preferences. Paying attention to the human literature could facilitate these advances.

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“…In animal studies, the animal must be trained to understand what constitutes the target, so it can then search, find, and select it when presented experimentally. This training can last up to several months (e.g., Orlowski, Ben-Shahar, & Wagner, 2018) and should be done with caution, as concluded from human studies, (Buračas & Albright, 1999;Nothdurft, Pigarev, & Kastner, 2009). Furthermore, since new training is required for every new visual-search experiment, testing the same animal on multiple types of visual-search tasks demands multiple training periods, which a time-consuming procedure.…”

Section: Efficient Search Inefficient Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, instead of increasing the number of distracting objects as in a classic visual-search experiments, the researchers increased the difficulty level of discriminating between the target and the background. Also, rather than testing how the target's and distractor's features affect visual search per se, the research was aimed to test how different strategies such as cuing and sequential priming, which are used to obtain initial focal attention, affect the visual-search behavior (Bond & Kamil, 1999;Goto, Bond, Burks, & Kamil, 2014) In the last decade, barn owls have become a major animal model in saliency and visual search research (Harmening, Orlowski, Ben-Shahar, & Wagner, 2011;Orlowski et al, 2015;Orlowski et al, 2018). Unlike most species, barn owls lack practically all eye movement, which in fact aids in the observation of their visual behavior through head tracking.…”

Section: Efficient Search Inefficient Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature integration theory in non-humans: Spotlight on the archerfish

Reichenthal

Segev

Ben-Shahar

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The ability to visually search, quickly and accurately, for designated items in cluttered environments is crucial for many species to ensure survival. Feature integration theory, one of the most influential theories of attention, suggests that certain visual features that facilitate this search are extracted pre-attentively in a parallel fashion across the visual field during early visual processing. Hence, if some objects of interest possess such a feature uniquely, it will pop out from the background during the integration stage and draw visual attention immediately and effortlessly. For years, visual search research has explored these ideas by investigating the conditions (and visual features) that characterize efficient versus inefficient visual searches. The bulk of research has focused on human vision, though ecologically there are many reasons to believe that feature integration theory is applicable to other species as well. Here we review the main findings regarding the relevance of feature integration theory to non-human species and expand it to new research on one particular animal modelthe archerfish. Specifically, we study both archerfish and humans in an extensive and comparative set of visual-search experiments. The findings indicate that both species exhibit similar behavior in basic feature searches and in conjunction search tasks. In contrast, performance differed in searches defined by shape. These results suggest that evolution pressured many visual features to pop out for both species despite cardinal differences in brain anatomy and living environment, and strengthens the argument that aspects of feature integration theory may be generalizable across the animal kingdom.

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Visual search in barn owls: Task difficulty and saccadic behavior

Cited by 32 publications

References 54 publications

What pops out for you pops out for fish: Four common visual features

What pops out for you pops out for fish: Four common visual features

Affect-Driven Attention Biases as Animal Welfare Indicators: Review and Methods

Feature integration theory in non-humans: Spotlight on the archerfish

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