Duke University Biology Department, Box 90338, Durham NC 27708, USA.
College of Wooster, Department of Biology, 1189 Beall Ave, Wooster OH 44691, USA.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2018 May;33(5):358-372. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2018.03.001. Epub 2018 Mar 30.
Acuity, the fineness with which sensory systems perceive and parse information, limits the information that organisms can extract from stimuli. Here, we focus on visual acuity (the ability to perceive static spatial detail) to discuss relationships between acuity and signal form and evolution. Research suggests that acuity varies by orders of magnitude across species, and that most animals have much lower acuity than humans. Thus, hypotheses regarding the function of spatial patterns must account for the acuity of relevant viewers. New data quantifying acuity in a range of taxa allow us to examine correlations between acuity and ecology, elucidate the selective forces that receiver acuity places on signal evolution, and examine how signals might appear to viewers with different acuities.
敏锐度是指感觉系统感知和解析信息的精细程度，它限制了生物体从刺激中提取信息的能力。在这里，我们专注于视觉敏锐度（感知静态空间细节的能力）来讨论敏锐度与信号形式和进化之间的关系。研究表明，敏锐度在物种之间存在数量级的差异，而且大多数动物的敏锐度都远低于人类。因此，关于空间模式功能的假设必须考虑到相关观察者的敏锐度。量化了一系列分类单元敏锐度的新数据使我们能够检验敏锐度与生态学之间的相关性，阐明接收者敏锐度对信号进化施加的选择压力，并研究不同敏锐度的观察者如何感知信号。
