LottoLab programmes: Human perception Bumblebees Robots ‘My School‘ Street science Musical spaces Media: Books, television, radio, popular press
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Research on simple systems such as bumblebees has the potential to explain the biological principles that are common to all visual animals, and can therefore help us to understand how we all see.
The reason why we study the visual system of bumblebees alongside that of humans is that while they have very different types of brains, their brain evolved to solve the same challenges that our brain evolved to solve. 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 in humans, however, bumblebees’ neural anatomy is highly stereotyped when they are born – i.e., one brain is much like the other. This, then, creates the possibility of directly measuring the effects of experience on neural anatomy and thus the relationship between brain structure and behaviour.
Our Bumblebees programme incorporates a series of physiological and behavioural experiments that aim to explain how insect vision overcomes the most important challenge faced by any visual animal: the fact that the image that falls on the eye does not directly represent the conditions in the world (reflectance, illumination, distance, etc) that generated it. Because all images are uncertain, understanding how the brain of the bee learns to generate robust behaviour in the fact of uncertainty will provide an important foundation for rationalizing the principles of perception in all systems, including humans.
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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
An exhibition that provided a unique perspective on light and colour as part of the ‘Dan Flavin: A Retrospective’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, and included Beau Lotto’s White Light White Shadows installation.
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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.
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Virtual bee project
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This research programme is creating virtual bees, what we call APIANTS, to help explain vision.
In our Blackawton Bees project, we have again 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-to-10 year-old children.
