Professor Paul Graham
How do ants use vision for navigation? From sensory ecology to behavoiur to computational models
Collaboration with Prof Thomas Nowotny and Prof Andy Philippides
Our aim is to examine the ways in which insects use, encode and recognise natural visual scenes. Despite its importance for all spatial behaviour, little is known about how any animal encodes and identifies natural visual scenes. Insects with their low resolution eyes and small brains are likely to have efficient ways of encoding scenes that can be investigated through their stereotyped viewing strategies.
Our approach involves behavioural studies with ants, sensory reconstructions of natural environments and computational modelling. All designed to elucidate the sensori-motor processing that underpins navigation. Neuroethological projects like this benefit from a computational and theoretical components to contextualise behavioural results, thus we analyse natural ant habitats to investigate “what the world looks like to an ant?” so that we can propose what information is available and what type of visual system would be optimal for extracting this information. We can relate these visual properties to the known neural anatomy of the insect visual system.
Overall, projects in this area are interdisciplinary and can involve flexible combinations of behavioural experiments in lab or field with computational analysis. Therefore the project will suit a student who is comfortable learning experimental and numerical methods.
Key references
- Collett, T., Graham, P., & Heinze, S. (2025). The neuroethology of ant navigation. Current Biology, 35(3), R110-R124.
- Wystrach A and Graham P (2012) What can we learn from studies of insect navigation? Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.04.017