[Avery Andrews 950518]
Today's issue of our campus rag had an article about some very interesting
work by a guy called Mandyam Srinivasan, who seems to have been doing
some very clever work on perceptual control by bees.
They can be shown to remember how far down a tunnel food has been
placed: train them to go a set distance for food, and then if you
remove the food, they will stop at the distance they have learned, and
mill around looking for it.
How do they know how far to go? Evidently by integrating the visual
flow. If, after training them, you make the tunnel wider, they will
go further, since walls further away means you have to go further to
get the same integral of flow. Make the tunnel narrower, they go a
shorter distance, for the same reason. If the tunnel has horizontal
stripes, they go in indefinitely, presumably because no flow registers
at all.
He also shows that they stay in the middle of the tunnel by equalizing
the flow on both sides: if you make one wall of the tunnel move in the
direction they are going, they move closer to it.
The article doesn't have citations for publications, but presumably
something will be forthcoming eventually.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au