CCNR People

Tom Collett - Professor of Neurobiology

	Phone Location Email	++44 (1273) 87-8507 JMS 3D14 T.S.Collett@sussex.ac.uk
	Search the CCNR bibliography for papers by Tom Collett

Research Interests

Tom has been studying insect vision and navigation for 30 years and in that time has looked at many different aspects of insect behaviour. Currently he is looking at aspects of path integration and the behavioural mechanisms of learning in ants.

Path integration requires an insect to continuously update a homeward vector, by integrating information about direction of heading and distance travelled. Tom has shown that desert ants use a more sophisticated vector technique whereby vectors can be ass ociated with visual scenes. This enables the insect to better deal with cumulative errors that can occur with pure path integration. This is part of a wider interest in the issue of how different modes of navigation (path integration, visual landmark guid ance, magnetic cues etc.) can be merged to produce the robust spatial behaviours we observe.

Tom heads the Insect Navigation research group which comprises researchers from both CCNR and the Biology Department. He is also one of the coordinators of the Human Frontiers Research Project: Navigation in Insects and Robots.