ReviewFrontiers in neural circuits2014
Motion as a source of environmental information: a fresh view on biological motion computation by insect brains.
Review in Frontiers in neural circuits, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hoverfly responses to looming stimuli depend on elevation and speed.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Phenomenal interface theory: a model for basal consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Path integration and optic flow in flying insects: a review of current evidence.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Review
- The influence of saccades on yaw gaze stabilization in fly flight.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Optic flow based spatial vision in insects.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- Mormyrid fish as models for investigating sensory-motor integration: A behavioural perspective.Journal of zoology (London, England : 1987) · 2023Review
- Spatial tuning of translational optic flow responses in hawkmoths of varying body size.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Bumblebees display characteristics of active vision during robust obstacle avoidance flight.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- Facilitation of neural responses to targets moving against optic flow.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Disentangling of Local and Wide-Field Motion Adaptation.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2021Article
- Bumblebees perceive the spatial layout of their environment in relation to their body size and form to minimize inflight collisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Visually guided homing of bumblebees in ambiguous situations: A behavioural and modelling study.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Analysing Head-Thorax Choreography During Free-Flights in Bumblebees.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Resource-efficient bio-inspired visual processing on the hexapod walking robot HECTOR.PloS one · 2020Article
- Local motion adaptation enhances the representation of spatial structure at EMD arrays.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Peripheral Processing Facilitates Optic Flow-Based Depth Perception.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2016Article
- Editorial: What can simple brains teach us about how vision works.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2015Article
- How Lovebirds Maneuver Rapidly Using Super-Fast Head Saccades and Image Feature Stabilization.PloS one · 2015Article
- Insect-Inspired Self-Motion Estimation with Dense Flow Fields--An Adaptive Matched Filter Approach.PloS one · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite their miniature brains insects, such as flies, bees and wasps, are able to navigate by highly erobatic flight maneuvers in cluttered environments. They rely on spatial information that is contained in the retinal motion patterns induced on the eyes while moving around ("optic flow") to accomplish their extraordinary performance. Thereby, they employ an active flight and gaze strategy that separates rapid saccade-like turns from translatory flight phases where the gaze direction is kept largely constant. This behavioral strategy facilitates the processing of environmental information, because information about the distance of the animal to objects in the environment is only contained in the optic flow generated by translatory motion. However, motion detectors as are widespread in biological systems do not represent veridically the velocity of the optic flow vectors, but also reflect textural information about the environment. This characteristic has often been regarded as a limitation of a biological motion detection mechanism. In contrast, we conclude from analyses challenging insect movement detectors with image flow as generated during translatory locomotion through cluttered natural environments that this mechanism represents the contours of nearby objects. Contrast borders are a main carrier of functionally relevant object information in artificial and natural sceneries. The motion detection system thus segregates in a computationally parsimonious way the environment into behaviorally relevant nearby objects and-in many behavioral contexts-less relevant distant structures. Hence, by making use of an active flight and gaze strategy, insects are capable of performing extraordinarily well even with a computationally simple motion detection mechanism.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.