Article Synopsis
- Researchers used a motion-capture system to study how pigeons orient their heads towards attention-grabbing objects in their environment.
- Pigeons primarily utilize their foveas for distant viewing and their visually-sensitive "red areas" for observing nearby objects, indicating a specialized visual strategy.
- The study revealed that pigeons tend to fixate longer on objects seen with their foveas and showed a preference for using their right eye for detailed small objects while reserving their left eye for threats and social interactions.
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Article Abstract
Using a motion-capture system and custom head-calibration methods, we reconstructed the head-centric view of freely behaving pigeons and examined how they orient their head when presented with various types of attention-getting objects at various relative locations. Pigeons predominantly employed their retinal specializations to view a visual target, namely their foveas projecting laterally (at an azimuth of ± 75°) into the horizon, and their visually-sensitive "red areas" projecting broadly into the lower-frontal visual field. Pigeons used their foveas to view any distant object while they used their red areas to view a nearby object on the ground (< 50 cm). Pigeons "fixated" a visual target with their foveas; the intervals between head-saccades were longer when the visual target was viewed by birds' foveas compared to when it was viewed by any other region. Furthermore, pigeons showed a weak preference to use their right eye to examine small objects distinctive in detailed features and their left eye to view threat-related or social stimuli. Despite the known difficulty in identifying where a bird is attending, we show that it is possible to estimate the visual attention of freely-behaving birds by tracking the projections of their retinal specializations in their visual field with cutting-edge methods.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9646700 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21931-9 | DOI Listing |
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