Visual memories of landmarks play a major role in guiding the habitual foraging routes of ants and bees, but how these memories engage visuo-motor control systems during guidance is poorly understood. We approach this problem through a study of image matching, a navigational strategy in which insects reach a familiar place by moving so that their current retinal image transforms to match a memorized snapshot of the scene viewed from that place. Analysis of how navigating wood ants correct their course when close to a goal reveals a significant part of the mechanism underlying this transformation. Ants followed a short route to an inconspicuous feeder positioned at a fixed distance from a vertical luminance edge. They responded to an unexpected jump of the edge by turning to face the new feeder position specified by the edge. Importantly, the initial speed of the turn increased linearly with the turn's amplitude. This correlation implies that the ants' turns are driven initially by their prior calculation of the angular difference between the current retinal position of the edge and its desired position in their memorized view. Similar turns keep ants to their path during unperturbed routes. The neural circuitry mediating image-matching is thus concerned not only with the storage of views, but also with making exact comparisons between the retinal positions of a visual feature in a memorized view and of the same feature in the current retinal image.view-based-homing | snapshot | memory-retrieval | insect

Ants, like honeybees, can set their travel direction along foraging routes using just the surrounding visual panorama. This ability gives us a way to explore how visual scenes are perceived. By training wood ants to follow a path in an artificial scene and then examining their path within transformed scenes, we identify several perceptual operations that contribute to the ants' choice of direction. The first is a novel extension to the known ability of insects to compute the "center of mass" of large shapes: ants learn a desired heading toward a point on a distant shape as the proportion of the shape that lies to the left and right of the aiming point--the 'fractional position of mass' (FPM). The second operation, the extraction of local visual features like oriented edges, is familiar from studies of shape perception. Ants may use such features for guidance by keeping them in desired retinal locations. Third, ants exhibit segmentation. They compute the learned FPM over the whole of a simple scene, but over a segmented region of a complex scene. We suggest how the three operations may combine to provide efficient directional guidance.

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Since the 1970s, human subjects that have undergone corpus callosotomy have provided important insights into neural mechanisms of perception, memory, and cognition. The ability to test the function of each hemisphere independently of the other offers unique advantages for investigating systems that are thought to underlie cognition. However, such approaches have been limited to mammals. Here we describe comparable experiments on an insect brain to demonstrate learning-associated changes within one brain hemisphere. After training one half of their bisected brains, cockroaches learn to extend the antenna supplying that brain hemisphere towards an illuminated diode after this has been paired with an odor stimulus. The antenna supplying the naïve hemisphere shows no response. Cockroaches retain this ability for up to 24 h, during which, shortly after training, the mushroom body of the trained hemisphere alone undergoes specific post-translational alterations of microglomerular synaptic complexes in its calyces.