Mechanisms of active vision in barn owls: From atomic head movements to complex visual behaviors

仓鸮的主动视觉机制：从原子头部运动到复杂的视觉行为

• 批准号: 51155088
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Hermann Wagner
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Zoologie und Tierphysiologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2007-12-31 至 2010-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/51155088?language=en
• 关键词: Mechanisms; active; vision; barn; owls

In order to survive most animals have to acquire and scale sensory information in reference to the physical world to guide behavior. Information may be either collected passively, analyzing incoming sensory information, or actively, by the animals¿ own actions. This proposal investigates visual size discrimination in the barn owl as a special case. The project is divided into three work packages. The goal in the first work package is to describe and determine how well the barn owl is capable to discriminate objects of different sizes. The second work package introduces different distances as a case of generalization. The third work package will tackle the question how the barn owl uses motion parallax in an active fashion, not only to infer distance, but also the size of an object. The latter approach is also designed to improve our functional understanding of the conspicuous side-to-side head movements observed in barn owls. Experiments with human subjects will be carried out in parallel. From these studies a visual scaling factor should result that might be compared between species to advance our understanding of visual behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. We think that this research may eventually lead to a better understanding of visual orientation and may be valuable for application purposes.

为了生存，大多数动物都必须获得和扩展有关物理世界的感觉信息，以指导行为。信息可以被动地收集，或者通过动物自己的行动来分析感官信息，或者积极地分析感官信息。该提案调查了谷仓猫头鹰中的视觉尺寸歧视，作为一种特殊情况。该项目分为三个工作包。第一个工作包的目标是描述和确定谷仓猫头鹰能够区分不同尺寸的对象的能力。第二个工作包引入了不同的距离，作为概括的情况。第三个工作包将解决谷仓猫头鹰如何以主动方式使用运动平行的问题，不仅可以推断距离，还可以推断物体的大小。后来的方法还旨在提高我们对在谷仓猫头鹰中观察到的左右头部运动的功能理解。对人类受试者的实验将平行进行。从这些研究中，视觉缩放因素应导致物种之间可以进行比较，以从进化的角度提高我们对视觉行为的理解。我们认为，这项研究最终可能会更好地理解视觉取向，并且对于应用目的而言可能是有价值的。