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

为了生存，大多数动物必须获取并缩放参照物理世界的感觉信息来指导行为。信息可以是被动收集的，分析传入的感官信息，也可以通过动物自己的行动主动收集。这项提案将谷仓猫头鹰的视觉尺寸歧视作为一个特例进行调查。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区分不同大小物体的能力。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的方式使用运动视差的问题，不仅可以推断距离，还可以推断物体的大小。后一种方法也是为了提高我们对谷仓猫头鹰头部明显左右运动的功能理解。人体实验将并行进行。从这些研究中，一个视觉比例因子应该可以在物种之间进行比较，以从进化的角度推进我们对视觉行为的理解。我们认为，这项研究最终可能会对视觉定向有更好的理解，并可能具有应用价值。

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.