Priming of an animal’s sensory system can influence behaviour. Once an animal has been primed with a stimulus (e.g., the smell of a specific prey), it is then able to find the source of the stimulus (e.g., visually locate the prey) more easily than before. Visual priming has been most extensively studied in birds, yet jumping spiders (Salticidae) are ideal for studies of visual priming. Being extremely visual, salticids have a wide range of complex, visually-mediated behaviours.

Salticids have a unique, distributed visual system consisting of a pair of large primary eyes which are used for high spatial acuity and colour vision, and three sets of smaller, secondary eyes used for motion detection. While the primary eyes are responsible for object recognition, the resolution of the secondary eyes is also good enough to support visually-mediated behaviour. Combined, the four pairs of eyes give the spider a 360° field of view. This unique system is responsible for salticids having the highest spatial acuity for their body size of any animal. The aim of this study was to determine whether priming of the secondary eyes influences the scanning response of the primary eyes in the salticid Marpissa marina.

A specialised eye-tracker was used to simultaneously present visual stimuli to the spider while recording the response of the primary eyes. The secondary eyes of the jumping spider were primed with a stimulus (circle or bar) that either matched or mismatched a stimulus later presented to the primary eyes. Analyses of the scanning patterns and scanning activity of the primary eyes indicates that visual priming is occurring within the salticid visual system. This is the first evidence of visual priming happening within the distributed visual system of a salticid. By facilitating the scanning patterns of the primary eyes, priming from the secondary eyes is likely to cause salticids to make faster and more accurate decisions in nature.