Dittmar Laura, Egelhaaf Martin, Stürzl Wolfgang, Boeddeker Norbert
Department of Neurobiology and Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology', Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2011 Apr 21;5:20. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00020. eCollection 2011.
Honeybees visually pinpoint the location of a food source using landmarks. Studies on the role of visual memories have suggested that bees approach the goal by finding a close match between their current view and a memorized view of the goal location. The most relevant landmark features for this matching process seem to be their retinal positions, the size as defined by their edges, and their color. Recently, we showed that honeybees can use landmarks that are statically camouflaged, suggesting that motion cues are relevant as well. Currently it is unclear how bees weight these different landmark features when accomplishing navigational tasks, and whether this depends on their saliency. Since natural objects are often distinguished by their texture, we investigate the behavioral relevance and the interplay of the spatial configuration and the texture of landmarks. We show that landmark texture is a feature that bees memorize, and being given the opportunity to identify landmarks by their texture improves the bees' navigational performance. Landmark texture is weighted more strongly than landmark configuration when it provides the bees with positional information and when the texture is salient. In the vicinity of the landmark honeybees changed their flight behavior according to its texture.
蜜蜂通过地标在视觉上精确确定食物源的位置。关于视觉记忆作用的研究表明，蜜蜂通过找到当前视野与目标位置的记忆视野之间的紧密匹配来接近目标。这种匹配过程中最相关的地标特征似乎是它们在视网膜上的位置、由其边缘定义的大小以及它们的颜色。最近，我们发现蜜蜂可以利用静态伪装的地标，这表明运动线索也很重要。目前尚不清楚蜜蜂在完成导航任务时如何权衡这些不同的地标特征，以及这是否取决于它们的显著性。由于自然物体通常通过其纹理来区分，我们研究了地标的空间配置和纹理的行为相关性及相互作用。我们表明地标纹理是蜜蜂记忆的一个特征，并且有机会通过纹理识别地标会提高蜜蜂的导航性能。当地标纹理为蜜蜂提供位置信息且纹理显著时，地标纹理比地标配置的权重更大。在地标附近，蜜蜂会根据其纹理改变飞行行为。
