Visual motion pathway in bumblebees conveys information about the presence of
landmarks during navigational task
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1
Bielefeld University, Neurobiology, Germany
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2
Center of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’ CITEC, Germany
Bees use visual memories to learn the spatial location of their food sites. Characteristic learning flights help acquiring these memories at newly discovered foraging locations where landmarks – salient objects in the vicinity of the goal location that are used for navigation – can play an important role in guiding the animal’s homing behavior. Although bees have been shown in behavioral experiments to distinguish objects as landmarks on the basis of a variety of visual cues, the question of how these landmark features are encoded by their visual system is still open.
To tackle these questions, we tracked learning flights of free-flying bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) in an arena with distinct visual landmarks, reconstructed the visual input during these flights, and replayed ego-perspective movies to tethered bumblebees while recording the activity of direction-selective wide-field neurons in their optic lobe.
By comparing neuronal responses during a typical learning flight and targeted modifications of landmark properties in this movie we demonstrate that objects are indeed represented in the bee’s visual motion pathway. We show object-induced responses to be largely independent from object texture, which is in agreement with behavioral evidence.
We also find object-induced responses during head-saccades, even though these fast gaze shifts are strongly dominated by rotations, where all objects move with the same speed on the retina.
As these neurons convey information about landmark properties they might be directly involved in providing the necessary information for successful navigation.
Keywords:
bee,
Homing,
insect,
motion vision,
Optic Flow
Conference:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster (but consider for student poster award)
Topic:
Sensory: Vision
Citation:
Mertes
M,
Dittmar
L,
Egelhaaf
M and
Boeddeker
N
(2012). Visual motion pathway in bumblebees conveys information about the presence of
landmarks during navigational task.
Conference Abstract:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00086
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Received:
16 Apr 2012;
Published Online:
07 Jul 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Marcel Mertes, Bielefeld University, Neurobiology, Bielefeld, Germany, Marcel.Mertes@uni-bielefeld.de