How insects learn about the sun's course: alternative modeling approaches

Abstract

One of the major puzzles in animal behavior, arid a major problem to be solved in the design of robots, concerns how spatial patterns in the environment can be encoded internally and used for navigation in a complex natural environment. Most work on this issue has concerned landmark learning. This paper deals with a phenomenon of spatial learning that is at least as widespread in the animal world as landmark learning, but has received comparatively little attention. The phenomenon is the ability to learn the course of the sun relative to earth-bound features, and thus to use the sun as a true compass. After reviewing behavioral evidence from bees and ants, two particularly well studied species, we evaluate the applicability of symbolic and connectionist approaches to modeling the internal representation of this environmental pattern.