University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC Department of Biological Sciences, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA.
J Exp Biol. 2021 Apr 15;224(8). doi: 10.1242/jeb.242256. Epub 2021 Apr 23.
Mantis shrimp commonly inhabit seafloor environments with an abundance of visual features including conspecifics, predators, prey and landmarks used for navigation. Although these animals are capable of discriminating color and polarization, it is unknown what specific attributes of a visual object are important during recognition. Here, we show that mantis shrimp of the species Neogonodactylus oerstedii are able to learn the shape of a trained target. Further, when the shape and color of a target that they had been trained to identify were placed in conflict, N. oerstedii tended to choose the target of the trained shape over the target of the trained color. Thus, we conclude that the shape of the target was more salient than its color during recognition by N. oerstedii, suggesting that the shapes of objects, such as landmarks or other animals, are important for their identification by the species.
螳螂虾通常栖息在海底环境中，这些环境中有大量的视觉特征，包括同种个体、捕食者、猎物和用于导航的地标。尽管这些动物能够区分颜色和偏振光，但尚不清楚在识别过程中视觉物体的哪些特定属性是重要的。在这里，我们表明，物种 Neogonodactylus oerstedii 的螳螂虾能够学习训练目标的形状。此外，当他们被训练识别的目标的形状和颜色发生冲突时，N. oerstedii 往往会选择训练形状的目标而不是训练颜色的目标。因此，我们得出结论，在 N. oerstedii 的识别过程中，目标的形状比其颜色更为突出，这表明物体的形状，如地标或其他动物的形状，对于它们的识别很重要。
