Birds have acute vision and many remarkable visual cognition abilities,due to their unique living environment.The underlying neural mechanisms have also attracted interests of researchers in neuroscience.Here,we first...Birds have acute vision and many remarkable visual cognition abilities,due to their unique living environment.The underlying neural mechanisms have also attracted interests of researchers in neuroscience.Here,we firstly summarize the visual cognition abilities of birds,and make a comparison with mammals.Secondly,the underlying neural mechanisms are presented,including histological structure of avian brain and visual pathways,typical experimental results and conclusions in electrochemistry and electrophysiology.The latter mainly focuses on several higher brain areas related to visual cognition,including mesopallium ventrolaterale,entopallium,visual Wulst,and nidopallium caudolaterale.Finally,we make a conclusion and provide a suggestion about future studies on revealing the neural mechanisms of avian visual cognition.This review presents a detailed understanding of avian visual cognition and would be helpful in ornithology studies in the field of cognitive neuroscience.展开更多
Food and predators are the most noteworthy objects for the basic survival of wild animals,and both are often deviant in both spatial and temporal domains and quickly attract an animal’s attention.Although stimulus-sp...Food and predators are the most noteworthy objects for the basic survival of wild animals,and both are often deviant in both spatial and temporal domains and quickly attract an animal’s attention.Although stimulus-specific adaptation(SSA)is considered a potential neural basis of salient sound detection in the temporal domain,related research on visual SSA is limited and its relationship with temporal saliency is uncertain.The avian nucleus isthmi pars magnocellularis(Imc),which is central to midbrain selective attention network,is an ideal site to investigate the neural correlate of visual SSA and detection of a salient object in the time domain.Here,the constant order paradigm was applied to explore the visual SSA in the Imc of pigeons.The results showed that the firing rates of Imc neurons gradually decrease with repetitions of motion in the same direction,but recover when a motion in a deviant direction is presented,implying visual SSA to the direction of a moving object.Furthermore,enhanced response for an object moving in other directions that were not presented ever in the paradigm is also observed.To verify the neural mechanism underlying these phenomena,we introduced a neural computation model involving a recoverable synaptic change with a“center-surround”pattern to reproduce the visual SSA and temporal saliency for the moving object.These results suggest that the Imc produces visual SSA to motion direction,allowing temporal salient object detection,which may facilitate the detection of the sudden appearance of a predator.展开更多
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.61673353)the Key Scientific Research Projects of Colleges and Universities in Henan Province,China(No.20A413009)。
文摘Birds have acute vision and many remarkable visual cognition abilities,due to their unique living environment.The underlying neural mechanisms have also attracted interests of researchers in neuroscience.Here,we firstly summarize the visual cognition abilities of birds,and make a comparison with mammals.Secondly,the underlying neural mechanisms are presented,including histological structure of avian brain and visual pathways,typical experimental results and conclusions in electrochemistry and electrophysiology.The latter mainly focuses on several higher brain areas related to visual cognition,including mesopallium ventrolaterale,entopallium,visual Wulst,and nidopallium caudolaterale.Finally,we make a conclusion and provide a suggestion about future studies on revealing the neural mechanisms of avian visual cognition.This review presents a detailed understanding of avian visual cognition and would be helpful in ornithology studies in the field of cognitive neuroscience.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.62206253).
文摘Food and predators are the most noteworthy objects for the basic survival of wild animals,and both are often deviant in both spatial and temporal domains and quickly attract an animal’s attention.Although stimulus-specific adaptation(SSA)is considered a potential neural basis of salient sound detection in the temporal domain,related research on visual SSA is limited and its relationship with temporal saliency is uncertain.The avian nucleus isthmi pars magnocellularis(Imc),which is central to midbrain selective attention network,is an ideal site to investigate the neural correlate of visual SSA and detection of a salient object in the time domain.Here,the constant order paradigm was applied to explore the visual SSA in the Imc of pigeons.The results showed that the firing rates of Imc neurons gradually decrease with repetitions of motion in the same direction,but recover when a motion in a deviant direction is presented,implying visual SSA to the direction of a moving object.Furthermore,enhanced response for an object moving in other directions that were not presented ever in the paradigm is also observed.To verify the neural mechanism underlying these phenomena,we introduced a neural computation model involving a recoverable synaptic change with a“center-surround”pattern to reproduce the visual SSA and temporal saliency for the moving object.These results suggest that the Imc produces visual SSA to motion direction,allowing temporal salient object detection,which may facilitate the detection of the sudden appearance of a predator.
