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Ants' visual memory, by Romain GOULARD, University of Edinburgh - School of Informatics| old_uid | 17785 |
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| title | Ants' visual memory, by Romain GOULARD, University of Edinburgh - School of Informatics |
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| start_date | 2019/09/13 |
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| schedule | 12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Ants, despite their small brain, are among the most tremendous navigator in the animal kingdom. Several species have been shown to rapidly learn visual cues surrounding nest and food locations, and to develop memories for long routes through complex terrain in-between. They also express some systematic behaviour around their nest prior to foraging, fixating the nest occasionally, which has been proposed to build a memory from the nest surrounding. Nevertheless, the complete implementation of this visual memory in ant brain is mostly unknown both in term of what and where information is stored, and how it is used. To approach the question of the memory formation in ants we developed and validated a new kind of 2-DOF treadmill that allow untethered ants to freely explore a static scenery for the moment, and a virtual environment in the future. In addition, we adopt a theoretical approach to study the potential of certain brain structures, particularly the Mushroom Bodies related to associative learning in several insects, to sustain such memory based on a sparse representation of the visual scenery [1]. Currently, I am exploring theoretically how the learning walks could shape, and optimized to the environment statistics, the connectivity of the Kenyon cells, which are considered to sustain the sparse representation in ants’ brain. |
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| responsibles | IBCG |
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