The Müller-Lyer Illusion in Ant Foraging (original) (raw)
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Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2014
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.
Ants might use different view-matching strategies on and off the route
Journal of Experimental Biology, 2012
Individual foraging ants are known to rely on views of their surroundings for route learning and for pinpointing goals. Different strategies have been proposed to explain how ants might process visual information for navigation, but little is known about the actual development and nature of the view-based strategies used by ants in complex natural environments. Here, we constrained the knowledge of Melophorus bagoti ants to either the nest vicinity or a curved route (length 10m) and analysed their initial direction when released at both novel and familiar locations. In parallel, we used 360deg pictures of the scene as a basis for modelling different navigational strategies. We propose here a new hypothesis based on skyline height comparison to explain how ants home from novel locations. Interestingly, this strategy succeeded well at novel locations but failed on familiar terrain. By contrast, the use of a visual compass strategy failed at novel locations but could explain the results on familiar routes. We suggest that ants might switch between skyline height comparison and a visual compass strategy, depending on whether they are on familiar terrain or not. How ants could switch between strategies and how their memories develop are discussed in turn.
The Use of Edges in Visual Navigation by the Ant Leptothorax albipennis
Ethology, 2001
Certain navigating insects home in on their goal by moving so that currently viewed images of landmarks fall on the same retinal locations memorized during previous visits. Here we show that ants can use similar retinotopic learning to guide lengthy routes, by memorizing and walking parallel to a distinct visual edge. We induced workers of the ant Leptothorax albipennis to travel parallel to a prominent wall. When the wall's height was changed, the ants' paths consistently shifted toward a lowered wall and away from a raised wall, as would be expected if they attempt to keep the wall's image at a constant retinal position. These path shifts were smaller than would be expected if the wall was the only guide to navigation, suggesting that other cues are also important. Signi®cantly larger shifts were seen when edge guidance was enhanced by using two walls, one on each side of the path.
Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
Frontiers in Zoology, 2011
Background: Insects are known to rely on terrestrial landmarks for navigation. Landmarks are used to chart a route or pinpoint a goal. The distant panorama, however, is often thought not to guide navigation directly during a familiar journey, but to act as a contextual cue that primes the correct memory of the landmarks.
On the Encoding of Panoramic Visual Scenes in Navigating Wood Ants
Current Biology, 2016
Highlights d Ants navigating within a panorama composed of two shapes identify each shape d Shapes are identified through their intrinsic visual features d Shapes are also identified through the relative positions of their centers of mass d Ants learn a direction of travel relative to each shape and merge the directions
Route following by one-eyed ants suggests a revised model of normal route following
2020
SummaryThe prevailing account of visually controlled routes is that an ant learns views as it follows a route, while guided by other path-setting mechanisms. Once a set of route views is memorised, the insect follows the route by turning and moving forwards when the view on the retina matches a stored view. We have engineered a situation in which this account cannot suffice in order to discover whether there may be additional components to the performance of routes. One-eyed wood ants were trained to navigate a short route in the laboratory guided by a single black, vertical bar placed in the blinded visual field. Ants thus had to turn away from the route to see the bar. They often turned to look at or beyond the bar and then turned to face in the direction of the goal. Tests in which the bar was shifted to be more peripheral or more frontal than in training produced a corresponding change in the ants’ paths, demonstrating that they were guided by the bar, presumably obtaining infor...
Ants are known to use the terrestrial visual panorama in navigation. Recent evidence has accumulated for the use of the currently perceived visual panorama to determine a direction to head in. The pattern of the height of the terrestrial surround, the skyline, is one key cue for the Central Australian red honey ant Melophorus bagoti in determining a direction of travel. But ants might also possess some mechanism to match the skyline heights encountered during training, which functions to steer away from regions whose skyline is too high and towards regions whose skyline is too low. We made an initial test of this hypothesis by training ants to visit a feeder centred between two experimentally constructed walls of black cloth. Trained ants were then tested for their initial homing direction with the walls retaining their heights as encountered in training (controls), with one of the walls lowered or raised in height, or with one wall lowered and the opposite wall raised. Wall-height manipulations deflected the initial headings of ants towards the lower wall, with combined wall lowering and wall raising changing the initial headings by~30°w hen compared with controls. The results suggest that the ants combined the dictates of the panorama in determining the best direction of travel (a heading towards the nest) with some attractor mechanism that functions to establish the skyline heights of training conditions (a heading towards the lower wall).
Visual Cues for the Retrieval of Landmark Memories by Navigating Wood Ants
Current Biology, 2007
Background-Even on short routes, ants can be guided by multiple visual memories. We investigate here the cues controlling memory retrieval as wood ants approach a one-or two-edged landmark to collect sucrose at a point along its base. In such tasks, ants store the desired retinal position of landmark edges at several points along their route. They guide subsequent trips by retrieving the appropriate memory and moving to bring the edges in the scene toward the stored positions.