Mechanismen underlying visual search in barn owls.

谷仓猫头鹰视觉搜索的机制。

• 批准号: 269491818
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Hermann Wagner
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/269491818?language=en
• 关键词: Mechanismen; underlying; visual; search; barn

Visual search is a cognitive ability of humans and animals. During visual search attention is attracted to salient stimuli in the environment. In laboratory research observers are asked to search a target item in a scene containing many distracter items. In easy search tasks, search time and number of fixations do not depend on the number of other items presented. Therefore, such a search is also called parallel or feature search. The target is said to pop out. We have recently shown on the behavioral level that barn owls have a pop-out effect, similar to what is known from humans. Now we propose to study the neural basis of visual-search mechanisms in the barn owl and to further compare the behavior of barn owls with that of humans. Specifically we propose to record neural activity from awake, actively fixating owls while they are stimulated with visual-search patterns. We expect to find neurons in the forebrain of the barn owls that are sensitive to feature-search stimuli. The response of such neurons would differ in a situation when the target has the same orientation as the distracters and when it has a different orientation than the distracters. The same experiments will be done in sedated, passively viewing owls to see what difference an active behavior makes in the neural responses. Furthermore, we want to use stimulus paradigms recently tested in humans to see whether owls react to these stimuli similarly as humans do. All in all these experiments are intended to increase our knowledge about how evolution has shaped brains to cope with complex visual environments.

视觉搜索是人类和动物的认知能力。在视觉搜索期间，人们的注意力吸引了环境中的显着刺激。在实验室研究中，观察者被要求在包含许多干扰物品的场景中搜索目标项目。在简单的搜索任务中，搜索时间和注定数量不取决于其他项目的数量。因此，此类搜索也称为并行或功能搜索。据说该目标会突然出现。我们最近在行为层面上表明，谷仓猫头鹰具有弹出效果，类似于人类已知的效果。现在，我们建议研究谷仓猫头鹰中视觉搜索机制的神经基础，并进一步将谷仓猫头鹰的行为与人类的行为进行比较。具体而言，我们建议通过醒着的神经活动记录神经活动，并通过视觉搜索模式刺激猫头鹰在猫头鹰时积极固定。我们希望在谷仓猫头鹰的前脑中找到对特征搜索刺激敏感的神经元。当目标具有与干扰物相同的方向以及与干扰物不同的方向相同的情况时，这种神经元的反应会有所不同。同样的实验将在镇静的，被动地观察猫头鹰中进行，以查看主动行为对神经反应的差异。此外，我们希望使用最近在人类中测试的刺激范例，以查看猫头鹰是否像人类一样对这些刺激的反应。在所有这些实验中，所有这些旨在提高我们对进化如何塑造大脑以应对复杂视觉环境的知识。