In the last decades, desert ants have become model organisms for the study of insect navigation. In finding their way, they use two major navigational routines: path integration using a celestial compass and landmark guidance based on sets of panoramic views of the terrestrial environment. It has been claimed that this information would enable the insect to acquire and use a centralized cognitive map of its foraging terrain. Here, we present a decentralized architecture, in which the concurrently operating path integration and landmark guidance routines contribute optimally to the directions to be steered, with “optimal” meaning maximizing the certainty (reliability) of the combined information. At any one time during its journey, the animal computes a path integration (global) vector and landmark guidance (local) vector, in which the length of each vector is proportional to the certainty of the individual estimates. Hence, these vectors represent the limited knowledge that the navigator has at any one place about the direction of the goal. The sum of the global and local vectors indicates the navigator’s optimal directional estimate. Wherever applied, this decentralized model architecture is sufficient to simulate the results of quite a number of diverse cue-conflict experiments, which have recently been performed in various behavioral contexts by different authors in both desert ants and honeybees. They include even those experiments that have deliberately been designed by former authors to strengthen the evidence for a metric cognitive map in bees.
Do familiar landmarks reset the global path integration system of desert ants?
