De Agro, Massimo and Roessler, Daniela C. and Kim, Kris and Shamble, Paul S. (2021) Perception of biological motion by jumping spiders. PLOS BIOLOGY, 19 (7): e3001172. ISSN 1544-9173, 1545-7885
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
The body of most creatures is composed of interconnected joints. During motion, the spatial location of these joints changes, but they must maintain their distances to one another, effectively moving semirigidly. This pattern, termed "biological motion" in the literature, can be used as a visual cue, enabling many animals (including humans) to distinguish animate from inanimate objects. Crucially, even artificially created scrambled stimuli, with no recognizable structure but that maintains semirigid movement patterns, are perceived as animated. However, to date, biological motion perception has only been reported in vertebrates. Due to their highly developed visual system and complex visual behaviors, we investigated the capability of jumping spiders to discriminate biological from nonbiological motion using point-light display stimuli. These kinds of stimuli maintain motion information while being devoid of structure. By constraining spiders on a spherical treadmill, we simultaneously presented 2 point-light displays with specific dynamic traits and registered their preference by observing which pattern they turned toward. Spiders clearly demonstrated the ability to discriminate between biological motion and random stimuli, but curiously turned preferentially toward the latter. However, they showed no preference between biological and scrambled displays, results that match responses produced by vertebrates. Crucially, spiders turned toward the stimuli when these were only visible by the lateral eyes, evidence that this task may be eye specific. This represents the first demonstration of biological motion recognition in an invertebrate, posing crucial questions about the evolutionary history of this ability and complex visual processing in nonvertebrate systems.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | ANTERIOR-LATERAL EYES; VISUAL-PERCEPTION; PRINCIPAL EYES; DENDRYPHANTINAE; SALTICIDAE; MOVEMENTS; BEHAVIOR; TRACKING; RETINAE; CHICKS; |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 590 Zoological sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Sep 2022 14:05 |
| Last Modified: | 07 Sep 2022 14:05 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/46835 |
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