Topic: Columba livia

Are birds aware of what they see? In other words, is it possible to discriminate between a conscious and unconscious state of visual perception in birds? An interesting phenomenon to answer this question is flash suppression: when an image is presented to one eye, it is suppressed from conscious perception as soon as a different image is flashed to the second eye. Although this topic has been well studied in mammals, little is known about birds. Thus, here we present a behavioral study to investigate flash suppression in pigeons (Columba livia). While the animals are head-fixated, a different

The remarkable navigation abilities of the rock pigeon (Columba livia) are facilitated by a sensory system that allows the detection of magnetic fields. While there is compelling behavioral evidence demonstrating the existence of a magnetic sense, the neuronal circuits that process magnetic information in the brain are largely unknown, and the primary sensory cells and transduction molecules have yet to be identified. To address these issues, we combined tissue clearing and light sheet microscopy to screen the pigeon brain for magnetically induced neuronal activity via C-FOS expression. This s