scholarly journals A desert ant's memory of recent visual experience and the control of route guidance

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1787) ◽  
pp. 20140634 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Collett
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Control Element ◽  
Route Guidance ◽  
General Role ◽  
Simple Route ◽  
Guidance Cues ◽  
Desert Ants ◽  
Series Of Experiments

Insects such as desert ants learn stereotyped visual routes between their nests and reliable food sites. Studies here reveal an important control element for ensuring that the route memories are used appropriately. They find that visual route memories can be disengaged, so that they do not provide guidance, even when all appropriate visual cues are present and when there are no competing guidance cues. Ants were trained along a simple route dominated by a single isolated landmark. If returning ants were caught just before entering the nest and replaced at the feeder, then they often interrupted the recapitulation of their homeward route with a period of apparent confusion during which the route memories were ignored. A series of experiments showed that this confusion occurred in response to the repetition of the route, and that the ants must therefore maintain some kind of a memory of their visual experience on the current trip home. A conceptual model of route guidance is offered to explain the results here. It proposes how the memory might act and suggests a general role for disengagement in regulating route guidance.

scholarly journals Exposure to visual cues of pathogen contagion changes preferences for masculinity and symmetry in opposite-sex faces

2010 ◽  
Vol 278 (1714) ◽  
pp. 2032-2039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony C. Little ◽  
Lisa M. DeBruine ◽  
Benedict C. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cues ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Mate Preferences ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Gene Markers ◽  
Visual Preferences ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
Environmental Pathogens

Evolutionary approaches to human attractiveness have documented several traits that are proposed to be attractive across individuals and cultures, although both cross-individual and cross-cultural variations are also often found. Previous studies show that parasite prevalence and mortality/health are related to cultural variation in preferences for attractive traits. Visual experience of pathogen cues may mediate such variable preferences. Here we showed individuals slideshows of images with cues to low and high pathogen prevalence and measured their visual preferences for face traits. We found that both men and women moderated their preferences for facial masculinity and symmetry according to recent experience of visual cues to environmental pathogens. Change in preferences was seen mainly for opposite-sex faces, with women preferring more masculine and more symmetric male faces and men preferring more feminine and more symmetric female faces after exposure to pathogen cues than when not exposed to such cues. Cues to environmental pathogens had no significant effects on preferences for same-sex faces. These data complement studies of cross-cultural differences in preferences by suggesting a mechanism for variation in mate preferences. Similar visual experience could lead to within-cultural agreement and differing visual experience could lead to cross-cultural variation. Overall, our data demonstrate that preferences can be strategically flexible according to recent visual experience with pathogen cues. Given that cues to pathogens may signal an increase in contagion/mortality risk, it may be adaptive to shift visual preferences in favour of proposed good-gene markers in environments where such cues are more evident.

Lateral optic flow does not influence distance estimation in the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis

2000 ◽  
Vol 203 (7) ◽  
pp. 1113-1121 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Ronacher ◽  
K. Gallizzi ◽  
S. Wohlgemuth ◽  
R. Wehner
Keyword(s):  
Flow Field ◽  
Optic Flow ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Food Source ◽  
Motion Parallax ◽  
Distance Estimation ◽  
Desert Ants ◽  
Desert Ant ◽  
Walking Speeds ◽  
Cataglyphis Fortis

The present account answers the question of whether desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) gauge the distance they have travelled by using self-induced lateral optic-flow parameters, as has been described for bees. The ants were trained to run to a distant food source within a channel whose walls were covered with black-and-white gratings. From the food source, they were transferred to test channels of double or half the training width, and the distance they travelled before searching for home and their walking speeds were recorded. Since the animals experience different motion parallax cues when walking in the broader or narrower channels, the optic-flow hypothesis predicted that the ants would walk faster and further in the broader channels, but more slowly and less far in the narrower channels. In contrast to this expectation, neither the walking speeds nor the searching distances depended on the width or height of the channels or on the pattern wavelengths. Even when ventral-field visual cues were excluded by covering the eyes with light-tight paint, the ants were not influenced by lateral optic flow-field cues. Hence, walking desert ants do not depend on self-induced visual flow-field cues in gauging the distance they have travelled, as do flying honeybees, but can measure locomotor distance exclusively by idiothetic means.

scholarly journals The Alignment of Agent-First Preferences with Visual Event Representations: Contrasting German and Arabic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Esaulova ◽  
Sarah Dolscheid ◽  
Sabine Reuters ◽  
Martina Penke
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Transitive Action ◽  
Visual Preferences ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Visual Organization ◽  
The Right ◽  
Event Representations

AbstractHow does non-linguistic, visual experience affect language production? A series of experiments addressed this question by examining linguistic and visual preferences for agent positions in transitive action scenarios. In Experiment 1, 30 native German speakers described event scenes where agents were positioned either to the right or to the left of patients. Produced utterances had longer speech onset times for scenes with right- rather than left-positioned agents, suggesting that the visual organization of events can affect sentence production. In Experiment 2 another cohort of 36 native German participants indicated their aesthetic preference for left- or right-positioned agents in mirrored scenes and displayed a preference for scenes with left-positioned agents. In Experiment 3, 37 Arabic native participants performed the same non-verbal task showing the reverse preference. Our findings demonstrate that non-linguistic visual preferences seem to affect sentence production, which in turn may rely on the writing system of a specific language.

scholarly journals Prestimulus Subsequent Memory Effects for Auditory and Visual Events

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 1212-1223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leun J. Otten ◽  
Angela H. Quayle ◽  
Bhamini Puvaneswaran
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Memory Formation ◽  
Functional Interpretation ◽  
General Role ◽  
Electrical Brain Activity ◽  
Visual Events ◽  
Set Up

It has been assumed that the effective encoding of information into memory primarily depends on neural activity elicited when an event is initially encountered. Recently, it has been shown that memory formation also relies on neural activity just before an event. The precise role of such activity in memory is currently unknown. Here, we address whether prestimulus activity affects the encoding of auditory and visual events, is set up on a trial-by-trial basis, and varies as a function of the type of recognition judgment an item later receives. Electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of 24 healthy young adults while they made semantic judgments on randomly intermixed series of visual and auditory words. Each word was preceded by a cue signaling the modality of the upcoming word. Auditory words were preceded by auditory cues and visual words by visual cues. A recognition memory test with remember/know judgments followed after a delay of about 45 min. As observed previously, a negative-going, frontally distributed modulation just before visual word onset predicted later recollection of the word. Crucially, the same effect was found for auditory words and observed on stay as well as switch trials. These findings emphasize the flexibility and general role of prestimulus activity in memory formation, and support a functional interpretation of the activity in terms of semantic preparation. At least with an unpredictable trial sequence, the activity is set up anew on each trial.

Identification of Relevant Intra-Maze Cues in Latent Learning

1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 967-974 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Clifton ◽  
Kirk H. Smith ◽  
Clifford Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Test Trial ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Latent Learning ◽  
Series Of Experiments

A modification of Seward's (1949) procedure was used to demonstrate latent learning in a diamond maze, in which extra-maze cues are made irrelevant by having the positive and negative goal boxes adjacent. In a series of experiments, 55 of 60 rats made correct test trial choices. When the cues from visually distinctive areas halfway down the paths to the goal boxes were eliminated, only 15 of 30 Ss chose correctly. It was concluded that these visual cues controlled Ss' behavior.

Major Extratropical Cyclones of the Northwest United States: Historical Review, Climatology, and Synoptic Environment

2010 ◽  
Vol 138 (7) ◽  
pp. 2499-2527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Mass ◽  
Brigid Dotson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Extratropical Cyclones ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Discussion Section ◽  
General Role ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The northwest United States is visited frequently by strong midlatitude cyclones that can produce hurricane-force winds and extensive damage. This article reviews these storms, beginning with a survey of the major events of the past century. A climatology of strong windstorms is presented for the area from southern Oregon to northern Washington State and is used to create synoptic composites that show the large-scale evolution associated with such storms. A recent event, the Hanukkah Eve Storm of December 2006, is described in detail, with particular attention given to the impact of the bent-back front/trough and temporal changes in vertical stability and structure. The discussion section examines the general role of the bent-back trough, the interactions of such storms with terrain, and the applicability of the “sting jet” conceptual model. A conceptual model of the evolution of Northwest windstorm events is presented.

scholarly journals Colour and luminance contrasts predict the human detection of natural stimuli in complex visual environments

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 20170375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. White ◽  
Bibiana Rojas ◽  
Johanna Mappes ◽  
Petri Rautiala ◽  
Darrell J. Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cues ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Human Detection ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Forest Environment ◽  
Colour Perception ◽  
Stimulus Detection ◽  
Natural Noise ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

Much of what we know about human colour perception has come from psychophysical studies conducted in tightly-controlled laboratory settings. An enduring challenge, however, lies in extrapolating this knowledge to the noisy conditions that characterize our actual visual experience. Here we combine statistical models of visual perception with empirical data to explore how chromatic (hue/saturation) and achromatic (luminant) information underpins the detection and classification of stimuli in a complex forest environment. The data best support a simple linear model of stimulus detection as an additive function of both luminance and saturation contrast. The strength of each predictor is modest yet consistent across gross variation in viewing conditions, which accords with expectation based upon general primate psychophysics. Our findings implicate simple visual cues in the guidance of perception amidst natural noise, and highlight the potential for informing human vision via a fusion between psychophysical modelling and real-world behaviour.

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