Saliency as the basis of the pop-out effect in the archer fish
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1
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Life Science and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Israel
When an object considerably differs from its surrounding by primitive visual features such as orientation, color, shape or motion, it “pops-out”, i.e., appears salient over the background. Many behavioral studies in mammals have been conducted in order to explore this pop-out effect. Recording from the primary visual areas such as V1 showed that there are cells that can distinguish these pop-out stimuli from the background by generating saliency maps that can be used by later stage of visual processing to detect the target. Thus these saliency maps are believed to be the basis of the pop-out phenomenon in mammals. In this study we examined whether the observations in mammals are wide spread across vertebrate. Specifically, we studied the archer fish (Toxotes chatareus), which is unique among fish due to its hunting behavior. It hunts by shooting down insects situated up to two meters above the water level, using a squirt of water from its mouth. This ability to track a small target indicates that the archer fish has advanced visual capabilities. We asked (1) is there a perceptual saliency effect in the archer fish behavior, and (2) whether cells in the primary visual area of the archer fish can also distinguish pop-out stimuli. To address these issues, we performed a behavioral experiment, in which the fish had to detect a bar placed in a background with different orientation. We found that the archer fish is able to segregate the target from the background in a manner consistent with pop-out effect. To test whether the fish behavior rely on primitive detectors, in a way similar to those found in mammals, we recorded responses from neurons in the superficial layer of the archer fish optic tectum to visual stimuli which represented the segregation between the target, that was placed within the cells’ receptive field, and the background. We will present results from the electrophysiological experiments demonstrating the saliency in the archer fish optic tectum. We hypothesize that this receptive field property contributes to the archer fish ability to perform the pop-out task.
Keywords:
Saliency in the optic tectum,
target surround segregation,
visual information processing
Conference:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster (but consider for participant symposium and student poster award)
Topic:
Sensory: Vision
Citation:
Ben-Tov
M and
Segev
R
(2012). Saliency as the basis of the pop-out effect in the archer fish.
Conference Abstract:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00107
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Received:
24 Apr 2012;
Published Online:
07 Jul 2012.
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Correspondence:
Ms. Mor Ben-Tov, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Life Science and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel, mor.bentov@duke.edu