Asymmetry pays:: visual lateralization improves discrimination success in pigeons
Asymmetry pays:: visual lateralization improves discrimination success in pigeons
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DOI：
10.1016/s0960-9822(00)00671-0
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发表时间：
2000-09-07
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
Skiba, M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Güntürkün, O;Diekamp, B;Skiba, M
功能性大脑不对称曾经被认为是人类独有的，现在被认为是脊椎动物大脑组织的普遍原理[1]。偏侧化的盛行使其有可能具有一些主要优势。然而到目前为止，还缺乏确凿的证据。为了分析大脑不对称程度与视觉觅食表现程度之间的关系，我们研究了鸽子的谷物-砂砾辨别成功率，鸽子是一种在视觉对象处理方面具有左半球优势的物种[2,3]。这些鸟在左眼、右眼或双眼观看条件下执行任务。在大多数动物中，右眼视力优于左眼视力，双眼视力高于单眼视力。左眼和右眼水平之间的绝对差被定义为视觉不对称程度的衡量标准。不对称性较高的动物在双眼条件下更能成功地区分谷物和沙粒。这表明视觉不对称性的增加可以提高视觉引导觅食的成功率。鸽子视觉系统的不对称性可能会通过将物体识别过程集中到一个半球来提高物体识别过程的计算速度，同时防止大脑的另一侧启动自己的冲突搜索序列。
Functional cerebral asymmetries, once thought to be exclusively human, are now accepted to be a widespread principle of brain organization in vertebrates [1]. The prevalence of lateralization makes it likely that it has some major advantage. Until now, however, conclusive evidence has been lacking. To analyze the relation between the extent of cerebral asymmetry and the degree of performance in visual foraging, we studied grain-grit discrimination success in pigeons, a species with a left hemisphere dominance for visual object processing [2,3]. The birds performed the task under left-eye, right-eye or binocular seeing conditions. In most animals, right-eye seeing was superior to left-eye seeing performance, and binocular performance was higher than each monocular level. The absolute difference between left- and right-eye levels was defined as a measure for the degree of visual asymmetry. Animals with higher asymmetries were more successful in discriminating grain from grit under binocular conditions. This shows that an increase in visual asymmetry enhances success in visually guided foraging. Possibly, asymmetries of the pigeon's visual system increase the computational speed of object recognition processes by concentrating them into one hemisphere while preventing the other side of the brain from initiating conflicting search sequences of its own.