Topic: Foraging behavior

Several species of insects have been observed to perform accurate path integration, constantly updating a vector memory of their location relative to a starting position, which they can use to take a direct return path. Foraging insects such as bees and ants are also able to store and recall the vectors to return to food locations, and to take novel shortcuts between these locations. Other insects, such as dung beetles, are observed to integrate multimodal directional cues in a manner well described by vector addition. All these processes appear to be functions of the Central Complex, a highly

Colonies of ants and other eusocial insects are superorganisms, which perform sophisticated cognitive-like functions at the level of the group. In my talk I will review our efforts to establish the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi as a lab model system for the systematic study of the principles underlying collective information processing in ant colonies. I will use results from two separate projects to demonstrate the potential of this model system: In the first, we analyze the foraging behavior of the species, known as group raiding: a swift offensive response of a colony to the detection of

Visual attention refers to a set of processes allowing selection of relevant and filtering out of irrelevant information in the visual environment. A large amount of research on visual attention has involved visual search paradigms, where observers are asked to report whether a single target is present or absent. However, recent studies have revealed that these classic single-target visual search tasks only provide a snapshot of how attention is allocated in the visual environment, and that multitarget visual foraging tasks may capture the dynamics visual attention more accurately. In visual f