Background complexity and the detectability of camouflaged targets by birds and humans
Background complexity and the detectability of camouflaged targets by birds and humans
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2016.1527
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发表时间：
2016-09-14
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Cuthill, Innes C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Xiao, Feng;Cuthill, Innes C.
不被发现往往是生存的关键，而伪装是一种广泛的解决方案。然而，除了动物本身，背景的复杂性可能是重要的。这一点已经在使用人工模式的猎物和背景的实验室实验中得到了证明，但其机制仍然不清楚(尤其是因为“复杂性”是一个多方面的概念)。在这项研究中，我们确定了野鸟和人类参与者在野外寻找相同的隐蔽目标时的最佳预测因子。我们将检测成功与背景复杂性和从人类视觉显著文献中改编的视觉杂波的度量进行了比较。对于鸟类和人类来说，解释可检测性大部分变化的因素是树皮的纹理复杂性，这是通过特征拥堵(具体地说，背景中许多附近的边缘)的度量来衡量的。对于鸟类来说，这淹没了颜色匹配对当地环境的任何影响，尽管对人类来说，目标和树之间的局部亮度差异变得重要。对于这两个分类群来说，一个更抽象的复杂性衡量标准--熵--是一个较差的预测因子。我们的结果指出了影响鸟类和人类视觉搜索的背景复杂性的共同特征，以及如何量化它们。
Remaining undetected is often key to survival, and camouflage is a widespread solution. However, extrinsic to the animal itself, the complexity of the background may be important. This has been shown in laboratory experiments using artificially patterned prey and backgrounds, but the mechanism remains obscure (not least because 'complexity' is a multifaceted concept). In this study, we determined the best predictors of detection by wild birds and human participants searching for the same cryptic targets on trees in the field. We compared detection success to metrics of background complexity and 'visual clutter' adapted from the human visual salience literature. For both birds and humans, the factor that explained most of the variation in detectability was the textural complexity of the tree bark as measured by a metric of feature congestion (specifically, many nearby edges in the background). For birds, this swamped any effects of colour match to the local surroundings, although for humans, local luminance disparities between the target and tree became important. For both taxa, a more abstract measure of complexity, entropy, was a poorer predictor. Our results point to the common features of background complexity that affect visual search in birds and humans, and how to quantify them.