Perception and recognition of a visual landmark on ant foraging

This paper introduces a visual landmark for Japanese wood ants. The landmark has different patterns when viewed from an observing angle. Individual foragers learnt a food position related to a pattern of the landmark. During the training phase, they were allowed to explore the food location and perceive another pattern of the landmark. During the test phase, which came after the training phase, another pattern, which might be perceived by foragers during the training phase, was presented as ants could see that pattern from the direction of the start position. The ants in the test phase persisted in approaching the landmark more often compared with the control experiment test, where a landmark having a single pattern from any angle the ants looked at it was introduced on the field during the training phase. This result suggests that ants connect several snapshots into one and perceive a visual landmark sterically.