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Research on bumblebees has the potential to explain the biological principles that are common to all visual animals.
Bumblebees – like primates – see in colour using three receptors; they can recognise surface colour under different conditions of illumination and even experience the same illusions of colour that we see. Unlike us, however, their neural anatomy is highly stereotyped, can be raised in completely controlled (and therefore quantifiable) environments and their (flight) behaviour can be accurately measured and the activity of their neurons can be readily recorded. Here we are using complementary series of comparative physiological and behavioural experiments that aim of explain how insect colour vision – and by extension all natural brains – overcomes image uncertainty, information which will provide an important foundation for rationalizing the more principles that enable robust behaviour more generally.
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The flight of the bumblebee
Street science installation at the ScienceGallery in Dublin, Ireland that captures – literally – the flight of the bumblebee.
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AfterImage
Exhibition that provided a unique perspective on light and colour as part of the Dan Flavin: A Retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London. ' White Light White Shadows' installation designed by Beau Lotto. Afterimage collaborators were Mark Lythgoe, Mark Miodownick and Beau Lotto.
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Seeing the light
Illumination as a contextual cue to color choice behavior in bumblebees.Lotto, R.B. and Chittka, L. (2005)
Seeing the light
Illumination as a contextual cue to color choice behavior in bumblebees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 102:3852-3856.
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Bees recognise the colour of a surface
Bees recognise the colour of a surface under different colours of lights. Illumination as a contextual cue to color choice behavior in bumblebees.
Lotto, R.B. and Wicklein, M. (2005)Bees encode behaviourally significant spectral relationships in complex scenes to resolve stimulus ambiguity.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 102:16870-16874.
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Visual processing of the bee
Clarke, R. and Lotto, R.B.: Visual processing of the bee innately encodes higher-order image statistics when the information is consistent with natural ecology. Vision Research. (2009)
Determining the statistical relationships of images that facilitate robust visual behaviour is nontrivial. Here we ask if some spatial relationships are more easily learned by the visual brain than others. Visually naïve bumblebees were trained to recognise coloured artificial flowers in scenes of equal spatial complexity but differing patterns of stimulus intensity. When flowers of similar intensity were grouped into extended regions across the array (coincident with natural patterns of light), the accuracy of the bees' foraging behaviour was dependent on spatial context, even though this information was redundant to the task. When the same intensity information was organised into a pattern that was less consistent with natural patterns of illumination but of equal order, their behaviour was independent of spatial context and they required double the training time to solve the same conditional task. These observations suggest the brain is biased to more efficiently encode/learn ecologically ‘meaningful' image correlations.
Following the flight of the bumblebee for science and art.
In the project Blackawton Bees (in collaboration with Head Teach Dave Strudwick and tech Tina Wadwellyn) we again have performed truly novel experiments on bumblebees at a primary school in Devon. Except this time we have completely removed all boundaries: The experiments were not devised by the ‘scientist’, but by twenty five
8-year-old children.
