Idiothetic

Idiothetic

ENTRIES A–Z

Published in Philip Winn, Dictionary of Biological Psychology, 2003

Allothetic navigation involves the use of external cues: animals can learn about the relationships between permanent or semi-permanent objects in space and use this information to guide their movements around the world. Idiothetic navigation uses self- generated information: information from the VESTIBULAR SYSTEM, MUSCLES and joints, the flow of sensory information and animals' own sense of TIMING can all be used for this.

Cataglyphis meets Drosophila

View Article

Journal Information

Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2020

Rüdiger Wehner

Third, the centered search behavior that freely walking flies idiotheticly perform around the location of a food site even in the dark and even after the food has been removed may represent an ancient trait of which ants and bees could have taken advantage (Brockmann et al., 2018; Kim & Dickinson, 2017). By providing this idiothetic system with information about external compass cues derived from the sky (Wehner, 1997) or the geomagnetic field (Fleischmann, Grob, Müller, Wehner, & Rössler, 2018), a large scale, compass-aided path-integration routine could have evolved. Note that, as mentioned above, Drosophila indeed uses celestial cues based on the sun and the polarized light in the sky for steering straight courses.

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

ENTRIES A–Z

Cataglyphis meets Drosophila