The Oxford Navigation Group

DPhil student in the Fish Spatial Cognition group

Supervised by Prof. Theresa Burt De Perera, Dr. Cait Newport and Dr. Adélaïde Sibeaux

 

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Biography & Research Interests:

Imagine that your way back home has become foggy with air pollution to the extent that you cannot easily make out your surroundings. Would you still easily be able to walk back to your front door? 

 

All of the world’s aquatic environments are in one way or another being impacted by anthropogenic disturbances. One of these is visual pollution which may increase the turbidity of the water and affect the visibility as well as sensory information the fish are able to receive from their surroundings. Spatial cognition would aid them to navigate back home via various behavioural mechanisms. My research aims to deepen our understanding of these behavioural mechanisms and to see how they are influenced by turbidity. One such mechanism is path integration which requires estimating distance and the direction an individual travels, in order to navigate back along a homing vector. The studies I will be first undertaking will explore distance estimation in goldfish under various availabilities of sensory information (with turbidity), as well as further exploring the path integration strategy in pufferfish

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Contact:  alicja.rutkowska@st-annes.ox.ac.uk