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The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality

Flying bees make extensive use of optic flow: the apparent motion in the visual scene generated by their own movement. Much of what is known about bees' visually-guided flight comes from experiments employing real physical objects, which constrains the types of cues that can be presented. Here...

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Autores principales: Frasnelli, Elisa, Hempel de Ibarra, Natalie, Stewart, Finlay J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6079625/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30108522
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.01038
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author Frasnelli, Elisa
Hempel de Ibarra, Natalie
Stewart, Finlay J.
author_facet Frasnelli, Elisa
Hempel de Ibarra, Natalie
Stewart, Finlay J.
author_sort Frasnelli, Elisa
collection PubMed
description Flying bees make extensive use of optic flow: the apparent motion in the visual scene generated by their own movement. Much of what is known about bees' visually-guided flight comes from experiments employing real physical objects, which constrains the types of cues that can be presented. Here we implement a virtual reality system allowing us to create the visual illusion of objects in 3D space. We trained bumblebees, Bombus ignitus, to feed from a static target displayed on the floor of a flight arena, and then observed their responses to various interposing virtual objects. When a virtual floor was presented above the physical floor, bees were reluctant to descend through it, indicating that they perceived the virtual floor as a real surface. To reach a target at ground level, they flew through a hole in a virtual surface above the ground, and around an elevated virtual platform, despite receiving no reward for avoiding the virtual obstacles. These behaviors persisted even when the target was made (unrealistically) visible through the obstructing object. Finally, we challenged the bees with physically impossible ambiguous stimuli, which give conflicting motion and occlusion cues. In such cases, they behaved in accordance with the motion information, seemingly ignoring occlusion.
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spelling pubmed-60796252018-08-14 The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality Frasnelli, Elisa Hempel de Ibarra, Natalie Stewart, Finlay J. Front Physiol Physiology Flying bees make extensive use of optic flow: the apparent motion in the visual scene generated by their own movement. Much of what is known about bees' visually-guided flight comes from experiments employing real physical objects, which constrains the types of cues that can be presented. Here we implement a virtual reality system allowing us to create the visual illusion of objects in 3D space. We trained bumblebees, Bombus ignitus, to feed from a static target displayed on the floor of a flight arena, and then observed their responses to various interposing virtual objects. When a virtual floor was presented above the physical floor, bees were reluctant to descend through it, indicating that they perceived the virtual floor as a real surface. To reach a target at ground level, they flew through a hole in a virtual surface above the ground, and around an elevated virtual platform, despite receiving no reward for avoiding the virtual obstacles. These behaviors persisted even when the target was made (unrealistically) visible through the obstructing object. Finally, we challenged the bees with physically impossible ambiguous stimuli, which give conflicting motion and occlusion cues. In such cases, they behaved in accordance with the motion information, seemingly ignoring occlusion. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-07-31 /pmc/articles/PMC6079625/ /pubmed/30108522 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.01038 Text en Copyright © 2018 Frasnelli, Hempel de Ibarra and Stewart. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Physiology
Frasnelli, Elisa
Hempel de Ibarra, Natalie
Stewart, Finlay J.
The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title_full The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title_fullStr The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title_full_unstemmed The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title_short The Dominant Role of Visual Motion Cues in Bumblebee Flight Control Revealed Through Virtual Reality
title_sort dominant role of visual motion cues in bumblebee flight control revealed through virtual reality
topic Physiology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6079625/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30108522
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2018.01038
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