Researchers used wireless neural recording and imaging devices to 'listen in' on the hippocampal brain activity of groups of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew freely within a large flight room. The researchers were surprised to find that, in this social setting, the bat's 'place' neurons encoded not only the animal's location, but also information about the presence or absence of other bats, and even the identity of bats in their path.
The same neurons that help bats navigate through space may also help them navigate collective social environments, finds a new study published today in the journalMany mammals -- including bats and humans -- are believed to navigate with the help of a brain structure called the hippocampus, which encodes a mental"map" of familiar surroundings.
"This is one of the first papers to show identity representation in a non-primate brain," said study senior author Michael Yartsev, an associate professor of bioengineering and neuroscience at UC Berkeley."And surprisingly, we found it in the hub of what was supposed to be the brain's GPS.We found that it still acts as a GPS, but one that is also tuned to the social dynamic in the environment.
Due to the complexity of the experiment, Forli initially had doubts about whether allowing groups of bats to fly and interact freely would yield results about the neural basis of collective behavior. He was concerned that the movements of the bats and their social interactions might be too random to uncover robust relationships between their neural activity and their behavior.
"By recording just a handful of those neurons from this brain structure, we can really know what the bats were doing in their social space," Yartsev said."We could find out if they were going to an empty location or to a location where there were other individuals, which is really surprising."
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