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Updated: Aug 8, 2026

Integrating Visual Psychophysical Assays within a Y-Maze to Isolate the Role that Visual Features Play in Navigational Decisions
Published on: May 2, 2019
Visual perception and social foraging in birds
Esteban Fernández-Juricic1, Jonathan T Erichsen, Alex Kacelnik
1Department of Biological Sciences, California State University--Long Beach, Peterson Hall 1-109, 1250 Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90840, USA. efernand@csulb.edu
Abstract:
Birds gather information about their environment mainly through vision by scanning their surroundings. Many prevalent models of social foraging assume that foraging and scanning are mutually exclusive. Although this assumption is valid for birds with narrow visual fields, these models have also been applied to species with wide fields. In fact, available models do not make precise predictions for birds with large visual fields, in which the head-up, head-down dichotomy is not accurate and, moreover, do not consider the effects of detection distance and limited attention. Studies of how different types of visual information are acquired as a function of body posture and of how information flows within flocks offer new insights into the costs and benefits of living in groups.
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