Fig. 3. Looking patterns while travelling along the wall. (A,C,E) Distributions of looking distances, as defined in the top diagram, for ants trained to the 20 cm, 30 cm and fixed routes respectively. Normalised frequency is the number of video frames (frame rate 50 Hz) corresponding to the condition of each bin divided by the total number of frames in the sample. For every 20 ms time step, we calculated the point at which the forward extension of the ant's longitudinal axis intersects the wall. The looking distance is defined as the difference between this intersection point and the current x position of the ant. Bins are 2 cm wide, and the centres of the modal bins are 21 cm for the 20 cm condition, 23 cm for the 30 cm condition and 11 cm for the fixed wall condition. (B,D,F) Distributions of the orientations of body axis for ants in the same conditions as above, again normalised by the total number of frames. At 0°, an ant's longitudinal axis is parallel to the wall and positive angles are clockwise (the ant faces towards the wall). The grey shaded area gives the distribution of orientations for those frames in which the wall is viewed with the frontal retina. The black shaded area gives the subset of this distribution for which looking distance is between 10 and 30 cm (dashed lines on A and C).

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