Publication Date:
2012-01-28
Description:
The principal eyes of jumping spiders have a unique retina with four tiered photoreceptor layers, on each of which light of different wavelengths is focused by a lens with appreciable chromatic aberration. We found that all photoreceptors in both the deepest and second-deepest layers contain a green-sensitive visual pigment, although green light is only focused on the deepest layer. This mismatch indicates that the second-deepest layer always receives defocused images, which contain depth information of the scene in optical theory. Behavioral experiments revealed that depth perception in the spider was affected by the wavelength of the illuminating light, which affects the amount of defocus in the images resulting from chromatic aberration. Therefore, we propose a depth perception mechanism based on how much the retinal image is defocused.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Nagata, Takashi -- Koyanagi, Mitsumasa -- Tsukamoto, Hisao -- Saeki, Shinjiro -- Isono, Kunio -- Shichida, Yoshinori -- Tokunaga, Fumio -- Kinoshita, Michiyo -- Arikawa, Kentaro -- Terakita, Akihisa -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2012 Jan 27;335(6067):469-71. doi: 10.1126/science.1211667.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biology and Geosciences, Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22282813" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Cues
;
Depth Perception
;
Fixation, Ocular
;
Light
;
Locomotion
;
Opsins/analysis/physiology
;
Photoreceptor Cells, Invertebrate/chemistry/*physiology
;
Predatory Behavior
;
Spiders/*physiology
;
Vision, Ocular
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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