Visual cognition of birds and its underlying neural mechanism: A review

Abstract

Birds have acute vision and many remarkable visual cognition abilities, due to their unique living environment. The underlying neural mechanisms have also attracted interests of researchers in neuroscience. Here, we firstly summarize the visual cognition abilities of birds, and make a comparison with mammals. Secondly, the underlying neural mechanisms are presented, including histological structure of avian brain and visual pathways, typical experimental results and conclusions in electrochemistry and electrophysiology. The latter mainly focuses on several higher brain areas related to visual cognition, including mesopallium ventrolaterale, entopallium, visual Wulst, and nidopallium caudolaterale. Finally, we make a conclusion and provide a suggestion about future studies on revealing the neural mechanisms of avian visual cognition. This review presents a detailed understanding of avian visual cognition and would be helpful in ornithology studies in the field of cognitive neuroscience.

Keywords

• Avian
• Electrophysiology
• Neural mechanism
• Visual cognition