Perception Space—The Final Frontier 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Primer Perception Space—The Final Frontier Lars Chittka*, Axel Brockmann J perceive is not an objective, veridical representation of akob von Uexküll coined the termUmwelt to describe the subjective world of animals. The world that animals the physical world, he argued, but is instead a product of the particular sense organs that each species has acquired in its evolutionary history [1]. Many animals have sensory abilities that humans don’t, such as a magnetic compass sense in birds [2] or sensitivity to electric ?elds in ?sh [3]. But even within sensory modalities shared by many animals, such as vision, hearing, and olfaction, there are strong differences between species. For example, bees, but not humans, can see UV light [4,5] and smell carbon dioxide [6], and bats can hear ultrasound [7]. But what exactly is the structure of the perceptual worlds proposed by von Uexküll? Can we draw them on paper in the form of maps, allowing us to visualize a particular animal’s subjective view of the world? Will such maps allow us to predict the similarity of two stimuli (e.g., two colors or two scents) by inspecting the distance between the loci they produce in a perceptual space? Does understanding the metrics of such maps help us predict how stimulus mixtures will be perceived? Even though perceptual sensations may strike us as ethereal, they must be based on patterns of activity in neuronal hardware—thus, we need to look into the brains of animals to see how the neuronal circuitry processes the information from the sense organs. The study by Guerrieri et al. [8] on odor space in honeybees in this issue is an excellent example of how behavioral studies can be paired with neurobiological data to access the perceptual space of an animal. Here, we contrast the complexity of scent perception with two examples of simpler perceptual worlds, vertebrate frequency perception and bee color vision. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030137.g001 Figu