文章基本信息

标题：How desert ants use a visual landmark for guidance along a habitual route
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作者：Matthew Collett
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2010
卷号：107
期号：25
页码：11638-11643
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1001401107
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Many animals learn to follow habitual routes between important locations, but how they encode their routes is still largely unknown. Desert ants traveling between their nest and a food site develop stable, visually guided routes that can wind through desert scrub without the use of trail pheromones. Their route memories are sufficiently robust that if a nest-bound ant is caught at the end of its route and replaced somewhere earlier along it, the ant will recapitulate the route from the release site. Insects appear to use panoramas to recognize when they are on a familiar route. I examine here the cues then used for their guidance. Several mechanisms are known for straight segments of a route; but how does an ant encode a curved route along which both the views it sees, and the directions it takes, are constantly changing? The results here suggest that when an ant travels past a landmark on a familiar route, it uses the gradually changing direction of the landmark to trigger a set of associated learned heading directions. A route through a complex 2D environment could thus be encoded and followed economically if it is divided into panorama-defined segments, with each segment controlled by such a 1D mapping. The solution proposed for the ants would be simple to implement in an autonomous robot.
关键词：insect ; navigation ; algorithm ; encoding