Cue salience influences the use of height cues in reorientation in pigeons (Columba livia).

Abstract

Although orienting ability has been examined with numerous types of cues, most research has focused only on cues from the horizontal plane. The current study investigated pigeons' use of wall height, a vertical cue, in an open-field task and compared it with their use of horizontal cues. Pigeons were trained to locate food in 2 diagonal corners of a rectangular enclosure with 2 opposite high walls as height cues. Before each trial, pigeons were rotated to disorient them. In training, pigeons could use either the horizontal cues from the rectangular enclosure or the height information from the walls to locate the food. In testing, the apparatus was modified to provide (a) horizontal cues only, (b) height cues only, and (c) both height and horizontal cues in conflict. In Experiment 1 the lower and high walls, respectively, were 40 and 80 cm, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made more perceptually salient by shortening them to 20 and 40 cm. Pigeons accurately located the goal corners with horizontal cues alone in both experiments, but they searched accurately with height cues alone only in Experiment 2. When the height cues conflicted with horizontal cues, pigeons preferred the horizontal cues over the height cues in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that perceptual salience influences the relative weighting of cues. (PsycINFO Database Record

Updating headings in 3D navigation

“…While some animals navigate often in all three dimensions (e.g., rats travel underground pathways and bats fly in the air), humans primarily navigate on the horizontal planes (i.e., the ground). Recently, there have been growing interests in investigating how animals represent 3D spaces and update their headings in 3D spaces (Jeffery et al, 2013, 2015) and whether different navigation styles between species affect spatial memory and navigation (Du, Mahdi, et al, 2016; Du, Spetch, & Mou, 2016; Flores-Abreu et al, 2014). It is still not clear to what extent humans represent spatial relations in 3D spaces and update their locations relative to 3D spaces.…”

A reflection on noncognitive factors affecting spatial cognitive testing: Examples from nonmodel species.

“…In rodents trained on a spatial memory paradigm, individuals performed better when cues were larger and closer to the goal (Chamizo et al, 2006), when cues were brighter (Farina et al, 2015), or when there were more cues available (Champagne et al, 2002; Lopez et al, 2008). In pigeons, wall height was not used to orient until the walls were shortened, as shorter walls created greater cue saliency in the vertical plane (Du et al, 2016). In some reptiles and fish, creating more salience by including a greater number of spatial cues caused individuals to switch from a behavioral algorithm (e.g., a motor habit) to a more complex spatially based strategy (Hughes & Blight, 1999; Wilkinson et al, 2009).…”

Frontal-midline theta and posterior alpha oscillations index early processing of spatial representations during active navigation

“…In such a dynamic process to develop spatial memories, various navigational cues are involved: 1) external landmarks for orientation (termed "allothetic cues"), and 2) optic flow and other body-based cues for keeping track of distance (termed "idiothetic" cues). Differential weighting of allothetic and idiothetic cues is commonly observed among many tasks involving cue combination and competition (Du, Mahdi, et al, 2016;Harootonian et al, 2020;Mou & Zhang, 2014;L. Wang et al, 2018), which may suggest evidence for an accumulation process for selecting and assigning attributes to spatial memories.…”