Pritchard David J, Healy Susan D
School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Fife, UK.
Learn Behav. 2018 Mar;46(1):7-22. doi: 10.3758/s13420-018-0314-5.
Navigation is an essential skill for many animals, and understanding how animal use environmental information, particularly visual information, to navigate has a long history in both ethology and psychology. In birds, the dominant approach for investigating navigation at small-scales comes from comparative psychology, which emphasizes the cognitive representations underpinning spatial memory. The majority of this work is based in the laboratory and it is unclear whether this context itself affects the information that birds learn and use when they search for a location. Data from hummingbirds suggests that birds in the wild might use visual information in quite a different manner. To reconcile these differences, here we propose a new approach to avian navigation, inspired by the sensory-driven study of navigation in insects. Using methods devised for studying the navigation of insects, it is possible to quantify the visual information available to navigating birds, and then to determine how this information influences those birds' navigation decisions. Focusing on four areas that we consider characteristic of the insect navigation perspective, we discuss how this approach has shone light on the information insects use to navigate, and assess the prospects of taking a similar approach with birds. Although birds and insects differ in many ways, there is nothing in the insect-inspired approach of the kind we describe that means these methods need be restricted to insects. On the contrary, adopting such an approach could provide a fresh perspective on the well-studied question of how birds navigate through a variety of environments.
导航是许多动物必备的技能，而了解动物如何利用环境信息，尤其是视觉信息来导航，在动物行为学和心理学领域都有着悠久的历史。对于鸟类，在小尺度上研究导航的主要方法来自比较心理学，该方法强调支撑空间记忆的认知表征。这项工作大多基于实验室进行，尚不清楚这种环境本身是否会影响鸟类在寻找位置时学习和使用的信息。来自蜂鸟的数据表明，野生鸟类可能以截然不同的方式使用视觉信息。为了调和这些差异，我们在此提出一种新的鸟类导航研究方法，其灵感来源于对昆虫导航的感官驱动研究。利用专门设计用于研究昆虫导航的方法，就有可能量化导航鸟类可获取的视觉信息，进而确定这些信息如何影响鸟类的导航决策。我们聚焦于四个我们认为具有昆虫导航视角特征的领域，讨论这种方法如何揭示了昆虫用于导航的信息，并评估对鸟类采用类似方法的前景。尽管鸟类和昆虫在许多方面存在差异，但我们所描述的这种受昆虫启发的方法并无任何因素表明这些方法必须局限于昆虫。相反，采用这种方法可以为深入研究鸟类如何在各种环境中导航这一问题提供全新视角。
