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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.