Visual search and orientation saliency in barn owls

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Visual search and orientation saliency in barn owls Julius Orlowski1* and Hermann Wagner1 1 RWTH Aachen University, Department of Zoology and Animal Physiology, Germany Animals have only limited computational resources to process sensory information. Attention is the process which selects the most vital information to be processed first. Much of this process is understood in humans and primates. Attentional mechanisms direct the gaze to salient objects, while other visible information is apparently discarded. However, it is unclear whether and to what extend these mechanisms exist in non-primate species. Our particular interest is visual saliency based on orientation contrast, a perceptual product attributed to the functional organization of the mammalian brain. We study these processes in barn owls. Barn owls have frontally oriented eyes with a large binocular field of view. Their eyes are rigid; eye movements are limited to less than 2° due to the tubular shape of the owls’ eyes. Therefore, owls need to move their head to look at visual targets. Due to this fact, we can track the owls gaze with a single, head mounted microcamera: the Owlcam and devise simple experiments to analyze orientation salience in these animals. We confronted barn owls with open field scenes of different set sizes containing one target differing from similar distractors in orientation, without giving them an explicit task. The free viewing barn owls looked significantly longer, more often, and earlier at the target object compared to the distracters, thus displaying parallels to human and primate overt search behavior in bottom-up search tasks. As a next step we task them to search for the target item to determine whether barn owls have a popout effect similar to primates. If that is the case, search performance should be similar regardless of the set size. This would indicate that orientation saliency and visual search processes are similarly optimized in many species, despite differences in phylogeny and the structure of visual pathways brain anatomy. Keywords: animal vision, feature map, Owlcam, Pop-out, Saccades, visual behavior Conference: Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012. Presentation Type: Invited Symposium (only for people who have been invited to a particular symposium) Topic: Sensory: Vision Citation: Orlowski J and Wagner H (2012). Visual search and orientation saliency in barn owls. Conference Abstract: Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00021 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 20 Apr 2012; Published Online: 07 Jul 2012. * Correspondence: Mr. Julius Orlowski, RWTH Aachen University, Department of Zoology and Animal Physiology, Aachen, Germany, Julius@bio2.rwth-aachen.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Julius Orlowski Hermann Wagner Google Julius Orlowski Hermann Wagner Google Scholar Julius Orlowski Hermann Wagner PubMed Julius Orlowski Hermann Wagner Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.