ArticleJournal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology2018
Only natural local odours allow homeward orientation in homing pigeons released at unfamiliar sites.
Article in Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distant Landmarks Used for Navigation by Homing Pigeons.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Hippocampal LFP Responses during Pigeon Homing Flight in Outdoors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- A new data-driven paradigm for the study of avian migratory navigation.Movement ecology · 2025Review
- Homing pigeon navigational ontogeny: no evidence that exposure to a novel release site is sufficient for learning.Animal behaviour · 2024Article
- Olfactory navigation versus olfactory activation: a controversy revisited.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
According to the olfactory navigation hypothesis, birds are able to exploit the spatial distribution of environmental odourants to determine the direction of displacement and navigate from non-familiar locations. The so-called "olfactory activation hypothesis" challenged the specific role of olfactory cues in navigation by suggesting that olfactory stimuli only activate a navigational system that is based on non-olfactory cues, predicting that even artificial odourants alone are sufficient to allow unimpaired navigation. In this experiment, we compared tracks of experimental birds exposed to different olfactory stimuli before being made anosmic at the release site prior to release. One group of pigeons was exposed to purified air enriched with artificial odourants, while a second group was exposed to environmental air. The birds stimulated with artificial nonsense odourants displayed several behavioural differences from both untreated controls and anosmic pigeons exposed to environmental air prior to release: nonsense odourants birds were unable to determine the home direction, they mostly flew within a space outside the homeward oriented quadrant, and they flew shorter distances on the day of release. Our data failed to support a mere activational role of olfactory stimuli in navigation, and are consistent with the olfactory navigation hypothesis.
Indexed as
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Registered trials
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.