Long-hypothesized brain cells give bats their distance and angle to a location.
Bats have brain cells that keep track of their angle and distance to a target, researchers have discovered.
The neurons, called ‘vector cells’, are a key piece of the mammalian’s brain complex navigation system — and something that neuroscientists have been seeking for years.
Our brain’s navigation system has many types of cells, but a lot of them seem designed to keep track of where we are.
Researchers know of ‘place’ cells, for example, which fire when animals are in a particular location, and ‘head direction’ cells that fire in response to changes in the direction the head is facing.
The vector cells, by contrast, keep spatial track of where we are going.
Around one-third of these neurons were simple place cells, firing when the bats flew over a particular spot.
In the wild, a favourite fruit tree would usually be hidden behind other trees or over a hill, and so the bat — and its vector cells — would need to remember where that target was, says Ulanovsky.
On one side of it, they could no longer see the bananas, Still, when the bats were on this side, the vector cells maintained their tuning to the remembered goal.
Originally published at Cogly.
