Brightness cues affect gap negotiation behaviour in zebra finches

Flying animals have had to evolve robust and effective guidance strategies for dealing with habitat clutter. Birds and insects use optic flow cues to sense and avoid obstacles, but orchid bees have also been shown to use brightness cues during gap negotiation. Brightness cues might therefore be of general importance in structuring visually guided flight. To test the hypothesis that brightness cues affect gap negotiation behaviours in birds, we presented captive zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata with a symmetric or asymmetric background brightness distribution on the other side of a tunnel. The background brightness conditions influenced both the birds’ decision to enter the tunnel aperture, and their flight direction upon exit. Zebra finches were more likely to initiate flight through the tunnel if they could see a bright background through it; they were also more likely to fly to the bright side upon exiting. We found no evidence of the centring response that would be expected if optic..., , , # Brightness cues affect gap negotiation behaviour in zebra finches

This repository contains:

* `Rmarkdown.Rmd` and `Rmarkdown.html`: R markdown containing the analysis (including the code, results and figures) of the tabular data obtained from the analysis of the flight video data (`raw_data.csv` is supplied in the Supplementary Material).
* `morphotype_classification_data.csv`. CSV file compiling the results of the classification of the birds into 20 distinct morphotypes, which contains 6 columns and 422 rows (421 data rows + 1 header row). See below for an description of the rows and columns contents.
* `morphotype data visualisation.ipynb`: Jupyter Notebook containing the data visualisations by morphotype (corresponds to Figures 3, S3 and S4).
* `barplots_CI_tables.xlsx`: An Excel file containing two sheets to compute the Agresti-Coull confidence intervals for the proportions of left vs right sides of origins and arrivals which are used in `Rmarkdown.Rmd` to generate...