Shaowu Zhang

..Performance under these conditions is poorer than when marks are provided, but is still significantly better than chance level. 8. Control experiments rule out the use of external landmarks in all of these situations...

..Honey bees can thus ;plan' their activities in time and space, and use context to determine which action to perform and when...

..The findings point to a remarkably robust, and yet plastic, working memory in the honey bee...

..However, this number can be increased if the scent cues are augmented by visual cues. These findings have implications for the ways in which associations are established and laid down in honeybee memory...

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..Some specific examples are discussed. An important corollary arising from the analysis of compassless navigation is that the maximum expected displacement represents a robust measure of the straightness of a path...

..We cannot exclude, however, that the distinctness of sting-pheromone representation with respect to that of its components constitutes a form of specialized neural processing strategy for this kind of substance...

..The removal of image motion cues drastically compromises the regulation of flight speed, underscoring their role in this function...

..Our findings indicate that the specific glomerular patterns for odors are conserved during the development, and that odor representations are fully developed in the AL during the first 2 weeks following emergence...

..Associative grouping and recall of visual stimuli, demonstrated here for the first time in honeybees, provide an effective means of retrieving the appropriate navigational information from memory...

..The feasibility of this landing strategy is demonstrated by implementation in a robotic gantry equipped with vision...

..A familiar nectar scent can trigger specific memories of a route and therefore expedite navigation to the food source...

..Thus, distance flown is measured by a visually driven odometer that is surprisingly robust to variations in the texture or sparseness of the visual environment through which the bee flies...

..quot; Insects have also evolved sophisticated visuomotor mechanisms for pursuing prey or mates and possibly for concealing their own motion while shadowing objects of interest...

..The bee's perception of distance flown is therefore not absolute, but scene-dependent. These findings raise important and interesting questions about how these animals navigate reliably...

..The bees' ability to integrate elements of circadian time, place and visual stimuli is akin to episodic-like memory; we have therefore named this kind of memory circadian timed episodic-like memory...

..Hence, our results show that muCT is ideally suited for researchers who are interested in the 3D visualization of small invertebrate brains...

..The new non-destructive method reveals a novel avenue for the determination of relationships between the behaviours and genes of social insects...

..Thus, although the global nature of topological properties makes their computation difficult, topology may be a fundamental component of the vocabulary by which visual systems represent and characterize objects...

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