Abstract
Understanding how animals perceive and interact with the world around them is of fundamental importance for interpreting their behaviour, but also presents some unique challenges. In this talk I will introduce two of these challenges and discuss how we have been using virtual reality simulations with humans as model ‘predators’ to address them in an ecologically-inspired way. The first part will focus on the interaction between predators and moving prey – something which is incredibly hard to study in a controlled way in natural systems. The second part will discuss how we are using VR to simulate the visual world of predators, in terms of their colour vision, visual fields and acuity, and the implications this has for understanding how they search for and detect camouflaged prey.

Biography
Tom joined the University of Lincoln as a NERC independent research fellow in 2011, and is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Life Sciences. He works on a diverse range of questions relating to role of vision and olfaction in mediating animal behaviour, and has a particular interest in how technology can help address them. 
https://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/tpike