Introduction
The ability to visually recognize another individual may be a question of life and death. Recognition may be essential, be this for distinguishing friend from foe and for making split-second decisions of whether to approach or flee, or for courtship and mating as well as in parent-offspring interactions.
Not all recognition may be based on vision. A species may have a perceptual apparatus in which one sense dominates and others are negligible or even absent. In many organisms, communication and individual recognition may be multimodal, i.e., combining visual, auditory, or olfactory, vibratory, or gustatory cues to recognize each other.
In birds, as in humans and most diurnal primates, vision is one of the dominant senses. In these cases, vision is usually complex and is based on a highly developed system. Organization of eyes and position of eyes determine what is seen and how the brain can respond to visual inputs and, finally, how such information is processed and...
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Kaplan, G. (2021). Visual Recognition in Birds. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_638-1
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