UC Berkeley

Background

Bats can offer important insight into the neural computations underlying complex forms of navigation. Up to now, this had been done with the confound of the human experimenter being present in the same environment the bat was navigating in.

New method

We, therefore, developed a novel behavioral setup, the fully automated bat (FAB) flight room, to obtain a detailed and quantitative understanding of bat navigation flight behavior while studying its relevant neural circuits, but importantly without human intervention. As a demonstration of the FAB flight room utility we trained bats on a four-target, visually-guided, foraging task and recorded neural activity from the retrosplenial cortex (RSC).

Results

We find that bats can be efficiently trained and engaged in complex, multi-target, visuospatial behavior in the FAB flight room. Wireless neural recordings from the bat RSC during the task confirm the multiplexed characteristics of single RSC neurons encoding spatial positional information, target selection, reward obtainment and the intensity of visual cues used to guide navigation.

Comparison with existing methods

In contrast to the methods introduced in previous studies, we now can investigate spatial navigation in bats without potential experimental biases that can be easily introduced by active physical involvement and presence of experimenters in the room.

Conclusions

Combined, we describe a novel experimental approach for studying spatial navigation in freely flying bats and provide support for the involvement of bat RSC in aerial visuospatial foraging behavior.