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Participation of the homing pigeon thalamofugal visual pathway in sun‐compass associative learning
Author(s) -
Budzynski Cheri A.,
Gagliardo Anna,
Ioalé Paolo,
Bingman Verner P.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1046/j.0953-816x.2001.01833.x
Subject(s) - homing (biology) , compass , psychology , neuroscience , communication , cartography , biology , geography , ecology
The ascending thalamofugal visual pathway in pigeons ( Columba livia ) terminates in the telencephalic wulst. Characterizing the role of this pathway in visually guided behaviour has remained a challenge. To determine whether this pathway, and in particular the wulst, may participate in sun‐compass‐guided behaviour in homing pigeons, intact, ectostriatum‐lesioned or wulst‐lesioned pigeons were trained to use their sun compass to locate the direction of a food reward in an outdoor, octagonal arena. Control and ectostriatum‐lesioned pigeons learned the task well, and orientated appropriately during the first trial of the last three training sessions and after a phase‐shift manipulation. In contrast, the wulst‐lesioned pigeons learned the task but they took more sessions to learn, and their directional choices were more scattered during the first trial of the last three training sessions and after the phase‐shift manipulation. A subsequent regression analysis indicated that deeper layers of the wulst might have made more of a contribution to the observed behavioural impairments. The data indicate that the homing pigeon wulst participates in visually guided behaviour when the sun compass is used to learn the directional location of a goal.