Virtual is the new reality
Virtual is the new reality
复制标题
虚拟是新的现实
作者：
K. Witte;S. Gierszewski;L. Chouinard‐Thuly
理想的动物刺激是在实验者的完全控制之下，具有视觉特征，行为模式可以以任何方式变化，并且它在测试试验之间的表现和行为一致，可以很容易地重复多次和任何时间。这听起来像是生物学家的一厢情愿吗？在动物行为研究中使用和开发人工刺激的潜力实际上并不是一个新想法。即使在丁伯根的时代，研究人员也使用木材，粘土或其他材料来建造人造假人动物，以控制动物刺激的呈现（Ter Pelkwijk和Tinbergen 1937）。从那时起，人造模型动物的想法就随着技术的发展而发展。即使今天仍然以其原始形式使用（Kim和Velando 2014），粘土和木材模型也启发了机器人的使用，这些机器人是专门为预编程运动模式的标准化呈现而调整的工程对象（Martins et al. 2005; Landfall et al. 2008; Landfall et al. 2014）。与此同时，研究人员还开始拍摄活体动物，并回放这些视频以取代活体动物刺激。很快，这些视频开始被编辑，达到了一个点，今天，完整的场景，包括刺激动物被创建。计算机图形领域的持续进步和越来越多的高质量自由软件解决方案也缓解了这些技术进步。如今，计算机动画（CA）和虚拟现实（VR）系统，这些曾经专为人类娱乐和教育而创造的技术，现在被动物科学家使用。在计算领域，“虚拟”是指“不是物理上存在的，而是由软件制作的”（史蒂文森和林德伯格2015），它捕捉了CA和VR刺激的本质，这些刺激是使用计算机图形软件创建的。它们用于模拟动物“探索”的环境（在VR中），例如，研究空间认知（Stowers等人，2014），或者它们旨在用虚拟的对应物取代真实的动物，然后将其呈现为猎物，捕食者，同种或交配伴侣，这些动物或多或少可以在视觉交流的背景下与活体测试动物进行互动。人造动物和环境都有一个共同的事实，即它们可以根据特定的研究问题的特定参数来创建和改变。这使研究人员在实验之前和实验过程中具有高度的控制力，并创造了标准化的条件，便于测试给定的假设。由此，在实验期间自然地受到各种因素（例如动机的改变）影响的刺激动物的行为在实验者的控制下，这可以导致结果的较少变化，并且因此由于没有副作用而导致更稳健的结果。类似于已经建立的研究语音通信机制的程序，例如鸟鸣或警报呼叫的音频轨道可以被记录，编辑，创建和回放，使用CA的实验范式可以用于研究视觉通信，并扩展到VR空间认知。CA和VR甚至允许创建生物学上新颖的刺激来研究猎物检测，捕食者识别，同种识别，配偶偏好和视觉识别的其他方面的机制。
The ideal animal stimulus is under total control of the experimenter, has visual traits, and behavior patterns that can be varied in any way, and it appears and behaves consistently between test trials that can be easily repeated many times and any time. Does this sound like wishful thinking of a biologist? Using and exploiting the potential of artificial stimuli in animal behavior research is actually not a new idea. Even in the time of Tinbergen, researchers used wood, clay, or other materials to build artificial dummy animals that would allow control over the presentation of the animal stimulus (Ter Pelkwijk and Tinbergen 1937). Since then, the idea of artificial model animals has evolved alongside technology. Even if still used today in its original form (Kim and Velando 2014), clay and wood models have inspired the use of robots, engineering objects that are specifically tuned for the standardized presentation of preprogrammed movement patterns (Martins et al. 2005; Landgraf et al. 2008; Landgraf et al. 2014). Meanwhile, researchers also started to film live animals and played back these videos to replace live animal stimuli. Rapidly these videos started to be edited, reaching a point where, today, the complete scene, including the stimulus animal is created. Continuous advances in the computer graphics sector and increasing access to high-quality free software solutions also eased these technological advances. Nowadays, computer animation (CA) and virtual reality (VR) systems, technologies that were once exclusively created for the entertainment and education of humans, were now used by animal scientists. “Virtual” which, in the area of computing, refers to “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so” (Stevenson and Lindberg 2015) captures the nature of CA and VR stimuli, which are created using computer graphics software. They are used to simulate environments for the animals to “explore” (in VR), for example, to study spatial cognition (Stowers et al. 2014), or they are meant to replace real animals with virtual counterparts that are then presented as prey, predators, conspecifics, or mating partners which can more or less interact with live test animals in the context of visual communication. Artificial animals and environments all share the fact that they can be created and varied according to specific parameters of interest for specific research questions in focus. This gives researchers a high degree of control prior and during experiments, and creates standardized conditions that facilitate testing a given hypothesis. By this, the behavior of a stimulus animal, which naturally is affected by various factors during experiments (e.g. change of motivation), is under control of the experimenter which can lead to less variation in results and thus more robust results due to the lack of side effects. Similar to the already well-established procedures for investigating mechanisms of vocal communication, in which for example audio tracks of bird songs or alarm calls can be recorded, edited, created, and played back, experimental paradigms using CA can serve to study visual communication and with the expansion to VR also spatial cognition. CA and VR even allow creating biologically novel stimuli to investigate mechanism of prey detection, predator recognition, and recognition of conspecifics, mate preferences, and other aspects of visual recognition.