Paper detail

Towards a fully predictive model of flight paths in pigeons navigating in the familiar area: prediction across differing individuals

This paper will detail the basis of our previously developed predictive model for pigeon flight paths based on observations of the specific individual being predicted. We will then describe how this model can be adapted to predict the flight of a new, unobserved bird, based on observations of other individuals from the same release site. We will test the accuracy of these predictions relative to naive models with no previous flight information and those trained on the focal bird's own previous flights, and discuss the implications of these results for the nature of navigational cue use in the familiar area. Finally we will discuss how visual cues may be explicitly encoded in the model in future work.