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At least 559 records · Page 31Linked to original sources
PubMed2002

Memory use in insect visual navigation.

The navigational strategies that are used by foraging ants and bees to reach a goal are similar to those of birds and mammals. Species from all these groups use path integration and memories of visual landmarks to navigate through familiar terrain. Insects have far fewer neural resources than vertebrates, so data from insects might be useful in revealing the essential components of efficient navigation. Recent work on ants and bees has uncovered a major role for associative links between long-term memories. We emphasize the roles of these associations in the reliable recognition of visual landmarks and the reliable performance of learnt routes. It is unknown whether such associations also provide insects with a map-like representation of familiar terrain. We suggest, however, that landmarks act primarily as signposts that tell insects what particular action they need to perform, rather than telling them where they are.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

How dogs navigate to catch frisbees.

Using micro-video cameras attached to the heads of 2 dogs, we examined their optical behavior while catching Frisbees. Our findings reveal that dogs use the same viewer-based navigational heuristics previously found with baseball players (i.e., maintaining the target along a linear optical trajectory, LOT, with optical speed constancy). On trials in which the Frisbee dramatically changed direction, the dog maintained an LOT with speed constancy until it apparently could no longer do so and then simply established a new LOT and optical speed until interception. This work demonstrates the use of simple control mechanisms that utilize invariant geometric properties to accomplish interceptive tasks. It confirms a common interception strategy that extends both across species and to complex target trajectories.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

Spatial summation of peripheral Gabor patches.

Previous studies have specified the foveal pattern that is seen most efficiently, with the assumption that the waveform of the best pattern matches the impulse response of the most sensitive visual filter. We measured the threshold contrast for circular, collinear, and orthogonal Gabor stimuli of 6 Hz temporal frequency presented 7 deg above the fixation point. We found that the threshold contrast energy is minimal for a class of stimuli whose Fourier-spectra bandwidth is less than approximately 1 octave. These findings suggest that an energy algorithm might underlie spatial summation of peripheral Gabor patches. The different behavior of spatial summation in fovea and periphery might reflect the differences in pattern detectability across space in the central and peripheral visual fields. It is also possible that a coherent (cross-correlation) algorithm is employed in detection of foveal stimuli and that an incoherent (energy) algorithm is employed in detection of peripheral stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Space, territory and psychiatry.

Space and territory have been the hidden dimensions of human and other animal life. Beginning with studies reported in animals, and incorporating the few formal studies and several informal observations of man, this paper explains the importance of mastering the unwritten rules of space and territory which differ with individual cultures in relation to the behavioral aberrations possibly resulting from the disrupted territoriality of modern urban life.

Animals↗
PubMed1990

Behavioral recovery on a spatial variant of the Konorski test following prefrontal damage in dogs.

Two groups of naive dogs were trained on a spatial variant of the Konorski Test, in which pairs of successively presented auditory location cues were differentiated in a conditioning procedure. Instrumental leg flexion to positive stimuli was reinforced by food. Combinations of four different location cues were used as compound conditioned stimuli (CS). In group AA a positive CS involved two identical, successively presented location cues, Sx-Sx, separated by an interval of 5 s, whereas the negative CS was formed by two different successive location, cues, Sx-Sy, with the same intercomponent interval. In group AB positive and negative combinations of location cues were reversed: Sx-Sy combinations were positive, while Sx-Sx were negative. Solving the task required a comparison of the second CS component with the memory trace left by the first component of CS. The two groups did not differ in reaching the preoperative criterion, but the response time was significantly shorter in the AA group. Prefrontal proreal lesion produced a significant but transient impairment of performance in both groups. The third group, trained on a simple differentiation task with single location cues, was completely unimpaired.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Behavioral correlates of the distributed coding of spatial context.

Hippocampal place cells respond heterogeneously to elemental changes of a compound spatial context, suggesting that they form a distributed code of context, whereby context information is shared across a population of neurons. The question arises as to what this distributed code might be useful for. The present study explored two possibilities: one, that it allows contexts with common elements to be disambiguated, and the other, that it allows a given context to be associated with more than one outcome. We used two naturalistic measures of context processing in rats, rearing and thigmotaxis (boundary-hugging), to explore how rats responded to contextual novelty and to relate this to the behavior of place cells. In experiment 1, rats showed dishabituation of rearing to a novel reconfiguration of familiar context elements, suggesting that they perceived the reconfiguration as novel, a behavior that parallels that of place cells in a similar situation. In experiment 2, rats were trained in a place preference task on an open-field arena. A change in the arena context triggered renewed thigmotaxis, and yet navigation continued unimpaired, indicating simultaneous representation of both the altered contextual and constant spatial cues. Place cells similarly exhibited a dual population of responses, consistent with the hypothesis that their activity underlies spatial behavior. Together, these experiments suggest that heterogeneous context encoding (or "partial remapping") by place cells may function to allow the flexible assignment of associations to contexts, a faculty that could be useful in episodic memory encoding.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed1997

Functional architecture of the mystacial vibrissae.

We investigated the transduction operation and function of the mystacial vibrissae, using a comparative morphological analysis and behavioral experiments in rats. Vibrissal architecture was documented in a series of mammals to identify evolutionary conserved features of vibrissal organization. As a result of this analysis, we distinguish between a frontal microvibrissal system and macrovibrissal system of the mystacial pad. The latter was invariably comprised of whiskers aligned in regular rows. In each row, whiskers were oriented perpendicular to the animal's rostrocaudal axis; all shared a specific dorsoventral orientation. In all species, progressing from rostral to caudal in any vibrissal row, there was a precisely exponential increase in whisker length. Each whisker appeared to act as a lever-like transducer, providing information as to whether or not--but not where--an individual vibrissa had been deflected. The rat's frontal microvibrissae system was found to have a vibrissa tip density that was about 40 times higher than that of the mystacial macrovibrissae. In behavioral studies spatial tasks and object recognition tasks were used to investigate (a) search behaviors; (b) single whisker movements; (c) object recognition ability; and (d) effects of selective macro- or microvibrissae removal on task performances. A clear distinction between the functional roles of macro- and microvibrissae was demonstrated in these studies. Mystacial macrovibrissae were critically involved in spatial tasks, but were not essential for object recognition. Microvibrissae were critically involved in object recognition tasks, but were not essential for spatial tasks. A synthesis of these morphological and behavioral data led to the following functional concept: The mystacial macrovibrissae row is a distance decoder. Its function is to derive head centered obstacle/opening contours at the various dorsoventral angles represented by vibrissal rows. This distance detector model is functionally very different from traditional concepts of whisker function, in which the mystacial whiskers were hypothesized to form a fine grain skin-like object-recognizing tactile surface.

Animals↗