Attention-like processes in insects: applications to pollinator biology and health

一天中的每一分钟，我们都被视觉刺激淹没。由于我们的注意力能力，我们只能设法理解这些刺激，并把注意力集中在重要的刺激上。想象一下，在一个自行车摊上，在许多其他人中间寻找你的自行车。你可以通过关注相关特征（比如颜色）来找到它，这些特征可以帮助你找到你的自行车。我们并不是唯一面临这些问题的动物。其他动物，包括昆虫，也必须处理许多刺激，并对那些帮助它们觅食、交配或捕捉猎物的刺激做出反应。想象一只蜜蜂在长满其他花朵的草地中寻找有价值的花朵，或者一只螳螂必须抓住几只苍蝇中的一只。它们是如何处理所有的信息，并在所有的干扰中选择有价值的花朵或猎物的？昆虫的神经系统比人类简单得多，但我们对这种“类似注意力”行为背后的过程知之甚少。我想知道他们在面对许多任务和刺激时的解决方案是否和我们的一样，以及他们在哪些方面与我们的不同或相似。为了做到这一点，我将调查它们是否具有注意力的一些关键特征。我将改编人类实验中使用的视觉任务来模拟昆虫必须执行的自然任务，例如选择食物或躲避捕食者。首先，我要看看昆虫是只选择吸引它们注意力的刺激，还是像我们一样，了解一个不太明显的目标能帮助它们更好地发现它。然后我会问，它们是否和我们一样，即使不注意刺激也能注意到——这表明选择发生在较晚的阶段。我也会排除他们选择目标的其他可能解释。例如，蜜蜂选择一朵花可能只是因为它有多大的奖励，所以我们需要用化学方法控制奖励和对奖励的神经反应。我们注意力的另一个重要特征是，如果其中一项任务非常困难，我们会发现很难同时关注两项任务。如果两项任务都很容易，我们就设法同时兼顾。我将看看这是否也适用于昆虫。在研究了所有这些方面之后，我将使用这个框架来研究昆虫在自然界中的行为。我将看看花蜜中的化学物质如何影响上述视觉注意的各个方面。我还将研究杀虫剂是如何扰乱昆虫的视觉注意力的。目前可用的农药中含有的化学物质会干扰我们所知道的对注意力很重要的化学物质。观察它们对昆虫的影响可以直接比较昆虫和人类注意力的生物学特性。它还将使我们了解如何改善传粉媒介的健康，这是目前农业关注的一个重要问题。这个项目让我兴奋的是有可能进入与我们如此不同的生物体的大脑。如果能第一次发现它们是否像我们一样有注意力，或者它们是否有非常不同的过程，那将是很有趣的。在这个项目将开发的框架的帮助下，我们也能够对它们在复杂环境中的自然行为获得新的见解。这将有助于我们对授粉等领域的理解。像蜜蜂这样的传粉者对许多农业都至关重要。因此，如果我们了解它们如何照顾一朵花而不是其他花，或者在觅食时如何躲避捕食者，农业将受益。我们也可以利用我们可能找到的任何新的昆虫解决方案来帮助我们的技术。例如，必须导航和发现目标的小型飞行机器人可以模仿昆虫的解决方案。最后，研究昆虫的这些过程可以更容易地使用神经科学和遗传学的方法来研究注意力。这是因为这些方法中的许多不能应用于人类或其他灵长类动物。因此，我们可以从一个已经令人兴奋的前景中获得很多——弄清楚另一种生物的大脑是如何理解世界的。

Every minute of the day, we are flooded with visual stimuli. We only manage to make sense of these stimuli and focus on the important ones due to our capacity for attention. Imagine searching for your bike in the middle of many others at a bike stand. You manage to find it by attending to relevant features - like colour - that help you spot your bike. We are not the only animals that face these problems. Other animals, including insects, must also process many stimuli and respond to those that help them forage, mate or catch prey. Think of a bee searching for rewarding flowers in the middle of a meadow full of other flowers, or a praying mantis that must catch one fly among several. How do they process all the information and still choose the rewarding flowers or prey in the middle of all the distractors? Insect nervous systems are much simpler than ours, and yet we know little about the processes underlying this "attention-like" behaviour. I want to find out if their solutions when faced with many tasks and stimuli are like ours, and in what ways they differ from or resemble our own.To do this, I will investigate if they have some key features of attention. I will adapt visual tasks used in human experiments to mimic natural tasks that insects have to perform, e.g. selecting food, or avoiding predators. First, I will see if insects only choose stimuli that grab their attention or if learning about a less visible target can help them detect it better, as it does for us. I will then ask if, similar to us, they can notice stimuli even when they don't attend to them - indicating that the selection occurs at a later stage. I will also rule out other possible explanations for why they select targets. For instance a bee might choose a flower simply because of how rewarding it is, so we need to control the reward and the neural response to rewards chemically. Another important feature of our attention is that we find it difficult to attend to two tasks at the same time if one of them is very difficult. If both tasks are easy we manage to attend to both at once. I will see if this is true for insects as well. After looking at all of these aspects, I will use this framework to investigate how insects might behave in nature. I will look at how chemicals in flower nectar can influence the aspects of visual attention outlined above. I will also investigate how pesticides disrupt insect visual attention. Current available pesticides have chemicals that interfere with the chemicals we know are important for attention. Looking at their effect in insects would directly compare the biology of insect and human attention. It will also give us an insight into how we can improve pollinator health which is currently an important agricultural concern. What excites me about the project is the possibility of getting inside the head of organisms so different to us. It would be fascinating to find out for the first time if they have attention like we do, or if they have very different processes. With the help of the framework this project will develop, we would also be able to gain new insights into their natural behaviour in complex environments. This could then benefit our understanding of fields such as pollination. Pollinators like bees are vital for a lot of agriculture. Agriculture would therefore benefit if we learn how they attend to one flower over others or avoid predators while foraging. We could also use any novel insect solutions we might find to help our technology. For example, small flying robots that must navigate and spot targets could mimic insect solutions. Finally, studying these processes in insects makes it easier to use methods from neuroscience and genetics to study attention. This is because many of these methods can't be applied to humans or other primates. We could thus gain a lot from what is already an exciting prospect - figuring out how the brain of another organism understands the world.