Spherical treadmills have been used to study multiple behaviors in different insect species. In silk moths and honey bees, for instance, a ‘servosphere’-a form of spherical treadmill that compensates every locomotive movement of a walking insect-was first used to study olfactory orientation towards controlled odor stimuli such as pheromone components and odor gradients 8, 9. ‘Locomotion compensators’ were also developed to study decision-making by walking insects on two-dimensional surfaces. Newer versions of this apparatus are still used for numerous studies on visual learning and memory in flies 4, 5, 6, 7.
In this setup, which was first used to study how optical properties of compound eyes influence optomotor reactions 3, a tethered fly flies stationary in the middle of a cylindrical arena and experiences surrounding visual stimuli that can be updated by the fly’s movements.
Motion backgrounds nature simulator#
A predecessor of current VR systems is the flight simulator conceived for the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Insects have pioneered the implementation of VR paradigms aimed at studying perceptual and cognitive capacities. In such environments, experiences are simulated based on changes of perceived landscapes or images, which are updated based on the subject’s own movements and decisions 1, 2. Understanding the spatiotemporal processes that guide decision-making in animals and humans is essential in cognitive research and may be facilitated by virtual reality (VR) 1, 2, which allows generating of immersive spatial environments in well-controlled laboratory settings. In addition, we identify issues that may affect decision-making in VR landscapes, which require specific control by experimenters.
Overall, we show how background and target cues may interact at the perceptual level and influence associative learning in bees. We analyzed the specific contribution of foreground and background cues and discussed the role of attentional interference and differences in stimulus salience in the VR environment to account for these results. Whenever these cues were suppressed, color discrimination learning became possible. Our results showed that the presence of frontal, and to a lesser extent, of ventral background motion cues impaired the bees’ performance. We thus studied if and how the presence of such motion cues affected visual discrimination in our VR landscape. We included ventral or frontal background cues, which were also subjected to 3D updating based on the bee movements. Here we achieved a true 3D environment in which walking bees learned to discriminate a rewarded from a punished virtual stimulus based on color differences. Existing VR environments for bees are imperfect as they provide either open-loop conditions or 2D displays. Honey bees exhibit remarkable visual learning capacities, which can be studied using virtual reality (VR) landscapes in laboratory conditions.
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