Bisch-Knaden Sonja, Wehner Rüdiger
Department of Zoology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland.
Naturwissenschaften. 2003 Mar;90(3):127-30. doi: 10.1007/s00114-003-0405-8. Epub 2003 Feb 20.
Foraging desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, encounter different sequences of visual landmarks while navigating by path integration. This paper explores the question whether the storage of landmark information depends on the context in which the landmarks are learned during an ant's foraging journey. Two experimental set-ups were designed in which the ants experienced an artificial landmark panorama that was placed either around the nest entrance (nest marks) or along the vector route leading straight towards the feeder (route marks). The two training paradigms resulted in pronounced differences in the storage characteristics of the acquired landmark information: memory traces of nest marks were much more robust against extinction and/or suppression than those of route marks. In functional terms, this result is in accord with the observation that desert ants encounter new route marks during every foraging run but always pass the same landmarks when approaching the nest entrance.
觅食的沙漠蚂蚁，即福氏箭蚁（Cataglyphis fortis），在通过路径整合导航时会遇到不同序列的视觉地标。本文探讨了地标信息的存储是否取决于蚂蚁在觅食过程中学习地标时的背景这一问题。设计了两个实验装置，让蚂蚁体验放置在巢穴入口周围的人工地标全景（巢穴标记）或沿着直接通向喂食器的矢量路线放置的人工地标全景（路线标记）。这两种训练范式在获取的地标信息的存储特征上产生了显著差异：巢穴标记的记忆痕迹比路线标记的记忆痕迹在抗消退和/或抑制方面要强得多。从功能角度来看，这一结果与以下观察结果一致，即沙漠蚂蚁在每次觅食过程中都会遇到新的路线标记，但在接近巢穴入口时总是经过相同的地标。
