Desert ants are known to rely heavily on vision while venturing for food and returning to the nest. During these foraging trips, ants memorize and recognize their visual surroundings, which enables them to recapitulate individually learned routes in a fast and effective manner. The compound eyes are crucial for such visual navigation; however, it remains unclear how information from both eyes are integrated and how ants cope with visual impairment. Here, we manipulated the ants’ visual system by covering one of the two compound eyes and analyzed their ability to recognize familiar views. Monocular ants showed an immediate disruption of their ability to recapitulate their familiar route. However, they were able to compensate for this nonnatural impairment in a few hours by engaging in an extensive route-relearning ontogeny, composed of more learning walks than what naïve ants typically do. This relearning process with one eye forms novel memories, without erasing the previous memories acquired with two eyes. Additionally, ants having learned a route with one eye only are unable to recognize it with two eyes, even though more information is available. Together, this shows that visual memories are encoded and recalled in an egocentric and fundamentally binocular way, where the visual input as a whole must be matched to enable recognition. We show how this kind of visual processing fits with their neural circuitry.

中文翻译：

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对导航蚂蚁的视觉障碍和行为可塑性的补偿


众所周知，沙漠蚁在冒险觅食和返回巢穴时严重依赖视觉。在这些觅食之旅中，蚂蚁会记住并识别它们的视觉环境，这使它们能够快速有效地概括个人学习的路线。复眼对于这种视觉导航至关重要;然而，目前尚不清楚来自双眼的信息是如何整合的，以及蚂蚁如何应对视力障碍。在这里，我们通过覆盖两只复眼中的一只来操纵蚂蚁的视觉系统，并分析了它们识别熟悉视图的能力。单眼蚂蚁表示它们重述熟悉路线的能力立即中断。然而，他们能够通过参与广泛的路线再学习个体发育在几个小时内补偿这种非自然损伤，该个体发育由比天真的蚂蚁通常做的更多的学习行走组成。这种用一只眼睛的重新学习过程会形成新的记忆，而不会抹去以前用两只眼睛获得的记忆。此外，仅用一只眼睛学习路线的蚂蚁无法用两只眼睛识别它，即使有更多信息可用。总之，这表明视觉记忆是以自我为中心且从根本上是双眼的方式编码和回忆的，其中视觉输入作为一个整体必须匹配才能进行识别。我们展示了这种视觉处理如何与他们的神经回路相适应。