TY - JOUR
AU - Mittelstaedt, H
AB -  By HORST MITTELSTAEDT Mas-Planck-Institut fUr Verhaltensphysiologie, Seewiesen/Obb., Germany Active orientation means the determination and the maintenance-in short, the control-of an organism's spatial relations. Control of this kind requires a mechanism, a "system" in which organs that are able to pick up information about spatial relations are connected to organs that are able to change spatial relations. Hence, evidence of active orientation proves the existence within the organism of a "control system." The laws governing the structure and the behavior of control systems are found in control theory, which has recently reached a considerable degree of rigor, power, and generality. Its application should therefore greatly facilitate the analy­ sis of animal orientation. This review intends to demonstrate the main re­ sults of such an approach within the field of insect orientation. Workers in this old and well-cultivated field have often encountered con­ trol problems before theory was available. The solutions so far attempted by biologists do not reach much beyond the idea of "open-chain" reflex con­ trol and occasionally the qualitative description of a feedback relation. Since the explicit application of theoretical tools in this field began only a few years ago, the depth and width of the analysed 
TI - Control Systems of Orientation in Insects
JF - Annual Review of Entomology
DO - 10.1146/annurev.en.07.010162.001141
DA - 1962-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/annual-reviews/control-systems-of-orientation-in-insects-zvlodyr4Z5
SP - 177
EP - 198
VL - 7
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -