ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Bld 46, Biology Place, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2012 Apr;22(2):285-93. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2011.12.008. Epub 2012 Jan 3.
The ability to learn the location of places in the world and to revisit them repeatedly is crucial for all aspects of animal life on earth. It underpins animal foraging, predator avoidance, territoriality, mating, nest construction and parental care. Much theoretical and experimental progress has recently been made in identifying the sensory cues and the computational mechanisms that allow insects (and robots) to find their way back to places, while the neurobiological mechanisms underlying navigational abilities are beginning to be unravelled in vertebrate and invertebrate models. Studying visual homing in insects is interesting, because they allow experimentation and view-reconstruction under natural conditions, because they are likely to have evolved parsimonious, yet robust solutions to the homing problem and because they force us to consider the viewpoint of navigating animals, including their sensory and computational capacities.
学习世界上各个地方的位置并反复回访的能力对地球上所有动物的生活都至关重要。它是动物觅食、避免捕食者、领地性、交配、筑巢和育儿的基础。最近，在确定允许昆虫（和机器人）找到返回路径的感觉线索和计算机制方面取得了很大的理论和实验进展，而在脊椎动物和无脊椎动物模型中，导航能力的神经生物学机制也开始被揭示。研究昆虫的视觉归巢很有趣，因为它们允许在自然条件下进行实验和视图重建，因为它们可能已经进化出了简单但稳健的归巢问题解决方案，而且因为它们迫使我们考虑导航动物的视角，包括它们的感觉和计算能力。
