Wilzeck Christiane, Prior Helmut, Kelly Debbie M
Psychologisches Institut, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Eur J Neurosci. 2009 Feb;29(4):813-22. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2009.06626.x. Epub 2009 Feb 6.
In this study, we investigated how pigeons (Columba livia) represent environmental geometry and landmark information. Birds learned to locate the centre of a square arena by means of geometric cues alone, or by means of both geometric and landmark cues. By manipulating the type of information available at training and testing, we assessed which cues the birds had encoded, and through the use of monocular occlusion we examined how the information was represented by the two brain hemispheres. Our results show that both brain hemispheres encoded geometric and landmark information. During all viewing conditions, the geometric representation was based mainly on an absolute metric for distance. The relative use of geometry and landmarks was experience dependent. With both brain hemispheres available birds relied, to a greater degree, on geometric information and used it in a more integrated way than with either hemisphere alone. Overall, our findings show a different pattern for the hemispheric encoding of geometric and landmark information by the pigeon than that previously reported for the domestic chick. Our results suggest that the organization of spatial information processing in the left and right brain hemispheres of birds may be more diverse than what is currently known.
在本研究中，我们调查了鸽子（家鸽）如何表征环境几何形状和地标信息。鸟类学会了仅通过几何线索，或通过几何和地标线索来定位方形竞技场的中心。通过在训练和测试时操控可用信息的类型，我们评估了鸟类编码了哪些线索，并通过单眼遮挡来研究信息是如何由两个脑半球表征的。我们的结果表明，两个脑半球都编码了几何和地标信息。在所有观察条件下，几何表征主要基于距离的绝对度量。几何和地标的相对使用取决于经验。两个脑半球都可用时，鸟类比仅使用一个半球时更依赖几何信息，并以更综合的方式使用它。总体而言，我们的研究结果显示，鸽子对几何和地标信息的半球编码模式与之前报道的家鸡不同。我们的结果表明，鸟类左右脑半球中空间信息处理的组织方式可能比目前已知的更加多样。
