The Role of Landscapes and Landmarks in Bee Navigation: A Review.

The ability of animals to explore landmarks in their environment is essential to their fitness. Landmarks are widely recognized to play a key role in navigation by providing information in multiple sensory modalities. However, what is a landmark? We propose that animals use a hierarchy of information based upon its utility and salience when an animal is in a given motivational state. Focusing on honeybees, we suggest that foragers choose landmarks based upon their relative uniqueness, conspicuousness, stability, and context. We also propose that it is useful to distinguish between landmarks that provide sensory input that changes ("near") or does not change ("far") as the receiver uses these landmarks to navigate. However, we recognize that this distinction occurs on a continuum and is not a clear-cut dichotomy. We review the rich literature on landmarks, focusing on recent studies that have illuminated our understanding of the kinds of information that bees use, how they use it, potential mechanisms, and future research directions

The representation selection problem: Why we should favor the geometric-module framework of spatial reorientation over the view-matching framework

Many species rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation. They generally do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. Two influential frameworks for explaining that phenomenon are provided by geometric-module theories and view-matching theories of reorientation respectively. The former posit a module that operates only on representations of the global geometry of three-dimensional surfaces to guide behavior. The latter place snapshots, stored representations of the subject’s two-dimensional retinal stimulation at specific locations, at the heart of their accounts. In this paper, I take a fresh look at the debate between them. I begin by making a case that the empirical evidence we currently have does not clearly favor one framework over the other, and that the debate has reached something of an impasse. Then, I present a new explanatory problem—the representation selection problem—that offers the prospect of breaking the impasse by introducing a new type of explanatory consideration that both frameworks must address. The representation selection problem requires explaining how subjects can reliably select the relevant representation with which they initiate the reorientation process. I argue that the view-matching framework does not have the resources to address this problem, while a certain type of theory within the geometric-module framework can provide a natural response to it. In showing this, I develop a new geometric-module theory

Prototypical Components of Honeybee Homing Flight Behavior Depend on the Visual Appearance of Objects Surrounding the Goal

Honeybees use visual cues to relocate profitable food sources and their hive. What bees see while navigating, depends on the appearance of the cues, the bee’s current position, orientation, and movement relative to them. Here we analyze the detailed flight behavior during the localization of a goal surrounded by cylinders that are characterized either by a high contrast in luminance and texture or by mostly motion contrast relative to the background. By relating flight behavior to the nature of the information available from these landmarks, we aim to identify behavioral strategies that facilitate the processing of visual information during goal localization. We decompose flight behavior into prototypical movements using clustering algorithms in order to reduce the behavioral complexity. The determined prototypical movements reflect the honeybee’s saccadic flight pattern that largely separates rotational from translational movements. During phases of translational movements between fast saccadic rotations, the bees can gain information about the 3D layout of their environment from the translational optic flow. The prototypical movements reveal the prominent role of sideways and up- or downward movements, which can help bees to gather information about objects, particularly in the frontal visual field. We find that the occurrence of specific prototypes depends on the bees’ distance from the landmarks and the feeder and that changing the texture of the landmarks evokes different prototypical movements. The adaptive use of different behavioral prototypes shapes the visual input and can facilitate information processing in the bees’ visual system during local navigation

Where Am I? The Cognitive Architecture of Spatial Reorientation

Navigation is of fundamental importance to humans, just as it is for other species. And, like most other animal species, we possess a number of distinct navigational processes. This thesis examines navigation, focusing particularly on the widely studied phenomenon of reorientation following disruption to spatial behavior. In typical reorientation experiments, subjects rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation, and they do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. An influential explanatory framework aims to account for such findings by holding that subjects possess a modular mechanism known as the geometric module, which only operates on geometric information about three-dimensional extended surfaces. This thesis provides a sustained defense of this framework and develops a new type of geometric-module theory of reorientation. I begin by making the case that, if the general geometric-module framework is right, it has deep implications for two foundational debates in philosophy of psychology: the debate about the nature of mental representations and the debate about the structure of the mind. I then address the two most pressing challenges against the framework. The first challenge comes from what I call ‘the explanatory inflexibility objection’, which holds that the geometric-module framework simply does not have the required flexibility to deal with evidence that non-geometric cues can affect subjects’ search behavior in some experimental contexts. The second challenge arises from an alternative explanatory framework, the view-matching framework, which aims to explain subjects’ behavior in reorientation experiments by appealing to snapshots, stored representations of the subjects’ two-dimensional retinal stimulation at specific locations. In answering these two challenges, I put forward a new type of geometric-module theory which has stronger implications for debates in philosophy of psychology than standard geometric-module models

Omnidirectional Vision Based Topological Navigation

Goedemé T., Van Gool L., ''Omnidirectional vision based topological navigation'', Mobile robots navigation, pp. 172-196, Barrera Alejandra, ed., March 2010, InTech.status: publishe

Taking a goal-centred dynamic snapshot as a possibility for local homing in initially naïve bumblebees

Lobecke A, Kern R, Egelhaaf M. Taking a goal-centred dynamic snapshot as a possibility for local homing in initially naïve bumblebees. The Journal of Experimental Biology. 2018;221(2): jeb168674.It is essential for central place foragers, such as bumblebees, to return reliably to their nest. Bumblebees, leaving their inconspicuous nest hole for the first time need to gather and learn sufficient information about their surroundings to allow them to return to their nest at the end of their trip, instead of just flying away to forage. Therefore, we assume an intrinsic learning programme that manifests itself in the flight structure immediately after leaving the nest for the first time. In this study, we recorded and analysed the first outbound flight of individually marked naïve bumblebees in an indoor environment. We found characteristic loop-like features in the flight pattern that appear to be necessary for the bees to acquire environmental information and might be relevant for finding the nest hole after a foraging trip. Despite common features in their spatio- temporal organisation, first departure flights from the nest are characterised by a high level of variability in their loop-like flight structure across animals. Changes in turn direction of body orientation, for example, are distributed evenly across the entire area used for the flights without anysystematic relationship to the nest location. By considering the common flight motifs and this variability, we came to the hypothesis that a kind of dynamic snapshot is taken during the early phase of departure flights centred at the nest location. The quality of this snapshot is hypothesised to be ‘tested’ during the later phases of the departure flights concerning its usefulness for local homing

A Modular Geometric Mechanism for Reorientation in Children

Although disoriented young children reorient themselves in relation to the shape of the surrounding surface layout, cognitive accounts of this ability vary. The present paper tests three theories of reorientation: a snapshot theory based on visual image-matching computations, an adaptive combination theory proposing that diverse environmental cues to orientation are weighted according to their experienced reliability, and a modular theory centering on encapsulated computations of the shape of the extended surface layout. Seven experiments test these theories by manipulating four properties of objects placed within a cylindrical space: their size, motion, dimensionality, and distance from the space’s borders. Their findings support the modular theory and suggest that disoriented search behavior centers on two processes: a reorientation process based on the geometry of the 3D surface layout, and a beacon-guidance process based on the local features of objects and surface markings.Psycholog