Dill M, Wolf R, Heisenberg M
Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften (Biozentrum), Lehrstuhl für Genetik, Würzburg, Germany.
Nature. 1993 Oct 21;365(6448):751-3. doi: 10.1038/365751a0.
Honeybees remember the shapes of flowers and are guided by visual landmarks on their foraging trips. How insects recognize visual patterns is poorly understood. Experiments suggest that they try to match retinotopically the incoming visual pattern with a previously stored memory image. But bees can be conditioned to individual pattern parameters such as orientation of contours, colour or size. These and other results are difficult to reconcile with simple template matching. In such investigations, freely moving animals are observed; their behaviour and visual input, therefore, are not well known. Mostly, processing strategies are inferred from stimulus design. We have studied visual pattern recognition with tethered flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in a flight simulator and report here that flies store visual images at, or together with, fixed retinal positions and can retrieve them from there only. Position invariance, an acknowledged property of human pattern recognition, may not exist as a primary mechanism in insects.
蜜蜂能记住花朵的形状，并在觅食途中以视觉地标为指引。昆虫如何识别视觉模式，目前还知之甚少。实验表明，它们试图以视网膜拓扑的方式，将传入的视觉模式与先前存储的记忆图像进行匹配。但蜜蜂可以被训练适应个体模式参数，如轮廓方向、颜色或大小。这些结果以及其他结果很难与简单的模板匹配相协调。在这类研究中，观察的是自由活动的动物；因此，它们的行为和视觉输入并不为人熟知。大多数情况下，处理策略是从刺激设计中推断出来的。我们在飞行模拟器中用系留飞行的果蝇（黑腹果蝇）研究了视觉模式识别，并在此报告，果蝇将视觉图像存储在固定的视网膜位置，或与固定的视网膜位置一起存储，并且只能从那里检索它们。位置不变性是人类模式识别的一个公认特性，在昆虫中可能并不作为一种主要机制存在。
