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- Minds of Their Own
- EEG Responses to Visual Landmarks in Flying Pigeons
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 14, 28 July 2009, Pages 1159-1166
Alexei L. Vyssotski, Giacomo Dell'Omo, Gaia Dell'Ariccia, Andrei N. Abramchuk, Andrei N. Serkov, Alexander V. Latanov, Alberto Loizzo, David P. Wolfer and Hans-Peter Lipp
GPS analysis of flight trajectories of pigeons can reveal that topographic features influence their flight paths. Recording electrical brain activity that reflects attentional processing could indicate objects of interest that do not cause changes in the flight path. Therefore, we investigated whether crossing particular visual landmarks when homing from a familiar release site is associated with changes in EEG.
Birds carried both data-loggers for recording GPS position and EEG during flight. First, we classified characteristic EEG frequencies of caged birds and found five main bands: A: 0–3, B: 3–12, C: 12–60, D: 60–130, and E: 130–200 Hz. We analyzed changes in these activity bands when pigeons were released over sea (a featureless environment) and over land. Passing over the coastline and other prominent landmarks produced a pattern of EEG alterations consisting of two phases: activation of EEG in the high-frequency bands (D and/or E), followed by activation of C. Overlaying the EEG activity with GPS tracks allowed us to identify topographical features of interest for the pigeons that were not recognizable by distinct changes of their flight path.
We provide evidence that EEG analysis can identify landmarks and objects of interest during homing. Middle-frequency activity (C) reflects visual perception of prominent landmarks, whereas activation of higher frequencies (D and E) is linked with information processing at a higher level. Activation of E bands is likely to reflect an initial process of orientation and is not necessarily linked with processing of visual information.
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- A left-sided visuospatial bias in birds
Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved.
Current Biology, Volume 10, Issue 17, 1079-1081, 1 September 2000
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Asymmetry pays: visual lateralization improves discrimination success in pigeons
- Functional cerebral asymmetries, once thought to be exclusively human, are now accepted to be a widespread principle of brain organization in vertebrates []. The prevalence of lateralization makes it likely that it has some major advantage. Until now, however, conclusive evidence has been lacking. To analyze the relation between the extent of cerebral asymmetry and the degree of performance in visual foraging, we studied grain–grit discrimination success in pigeons, a species with a left hemisphere dominance for visual object processing [[2,3]]. The birds performed the task under left-eye, right-eye or binocular seeing conditions. In most animals, right-eye seeing was superior to left-eye seeing performance, and binocular performance was higher than each monocular level. The absolute difference between left- and right-eye levels was defined as a measure for the degree of visual asymmetry. Animals with higher asymmetries were more successful in discriminating grain from grit under binocular conditions. This shows that an increase in visual asymmetry enhances success in visually guided foraging. Possibly, asymmetries of the pigeon’s visual system increase the computational speed of object recognition processes by concentrating them into one hemisphere while preventing the other side of the brain from initiating conflicting search sequences of its own.