title: Optimal cue integration in ants.
abstract: In situations with redundant or competing sensory information, humans have been shown to perform cue integration, weighting different cues according to their certainty in a quantifiably optimal manner. Ants have been shown to merge the directional information available from their path integration (PI) and visual memory, but as yet it is not clear that they do so in a way that reflects the relative certainty of the cues. In this study, we manipulate the variance of the PI home vector by allowing ants (Cataglyphis velox) to run different distances and testing their directional choice when the PI vector direction is put in competition with visual memory. Ants show progressively stronger weighting of their PI direction as PI length increases. The weighting is quantitatively predicted by modelling the expected directional variance of home vectors of different lengths and assuming optimal cue integration. However, a subsequent experiment suggests ants may not actually compute an internal estimate of the PI certainty, but are using the PI home vector length as a proxy.
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK.
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wystrach
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK mmangan@staffmail.ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mangan
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Webb
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001000:Ants / Q000502:physiology*; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003463:Cues; D006702:Homing Behavior; D065852:Spatial Memory; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: Bayesian; ants; insects; navigation; optimal cue integration