Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats

Under natural conditions, animals encounter a barrage of sensory information from which they must select and interpret biologically relevant signals. Active sensing can facilitate this process by engaging motor systems in the sampling of sensory information. The echolocating bat serves as an excelle...

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Main Authors:	Wohlgemuth, Melville J., Kothari, Ninad B., Moss, Cynthia F.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5015854/

id	pubmed-5015854
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-50158542016-09-27 Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats Wohlgemuth, Melville J. Kothari, Ninad B. Moss, Cynthia F. Research Article Under natural conditions, animals encounter a barrage of sensory information from which they must select and interpret biologically relevant signals. Active sensing can facilitate this process by engaging motor systems in the sampling of sensory information. The echolocating bat serves as an excellent model to investigate the coupling between action and sensing because it adaptively controls both the acoustic signals used to probe the environment and movements to receive echoes at the auditory periphery. We report here that the echolocating bat controls the features of its sonar vocalizations in tandem with the positioning of the outer ears to maximize acoustic cues for target detection and localization. The bat’s adaptive control of sonar vocalizations and ear positioning occurs on a millisecond timescale to capture spatial information from arriving echoes, as well as on a longer timescale to track target movement. Our results demonstrate that purposeful control over sonar sound production and reception can serve to improve acoustic cues for localization tasks. This finding also highlights the general importance of movement to sensory processing across animal species. Finally, our discoveries point to important parallels between spatial perception by echolocation and vision. Public Library of Science 2016-09-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5015854/ /pubmed/27608186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002544 Text en © 2016 Wohlgemuth et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Wohlgemuth, Melville J. Kothari, Ninad B. Moss, Cynthia F.
spellingShingle	Wohlgemuth, Melville J. Kothari, Ninad B. Moss, Cynthia F. Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
author_facet	Wohlgemuth, Melville J. Kothari, Ninad B. Moss, Cynthia F.
author_sort	Wohlgemuth, Melville J.
title	Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
title_short	Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
title_full	Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
title_fullStr	Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
title_full_unstemmed	Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats
title_sort	action enhances acoustic cues for 3-d target localization by echolocating bats
description	Under natural conditions, animals encounter a barrage of sensory information from which they must select and interpret biologically relevant signals. Active sensing can facilitate this process by engaging motor systems in the sampling of sensory information. The echolocating bat serves as an excellent model to investigate the coupling between action and sensing because it adaptively controls both the acoustic signals used to probe the environment and movements to receive echoes at the auditory periphery. We report here that the echolocating bat controls the features of its sonar vocalizations in tandem with the positioning of the outer ears to maximize acoustic cues for target detection and localization. The bat’s adaptive control of sonar vocalizations and ear positioning occurs on a millisecond timescale to capture spatial information from arriving echoes, as well as on a longer timescale to track target movement. Our results demonstrate that purposeful control over sonar sound production and reception can serve to improve acoustic cues for localization tasks. This finding also highlights the general importance of movement to sensory processing across animal species. Finally, our discoveries point to important parallels between spatial perception by echolocation and vision.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5015854/
_version_	1613646436391452672

Action Enhances Acoustic Cues for 3-D Target Localization by Echolocating Bats

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