ReviewCurrent biology : CB2018
Principles of Insect Path Integration.
Review in Current biology : CB, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Learning in Cnidaria: A systematic review.Learning & behavior · 2021Pooled it
- Article
- Article
- Article
- Cambrian Artiopoda Reveals a Constraint in Euarthropod Brain Evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Combining social and private information: How ants use pheromones and learnt cues to navigate.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- Article
- Phobic responses of bull ants (Myrmecia midas) to odours introduced on their foraging route.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Article
- Multisensory coding of self-motion and its contribution to navigation.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Foraging by predatory ants: A review.Insect science · 2025Review
- Article
- Path integration and optic flow in flying insects: a review of current evidence.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Review
- Vector-based navigation in desert ants: the significance of path-integration vectors.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Article
- Desert ants (Melophorus bagoti) oscillate and scan more in navigation when the visual scene changes.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Article
- Population coding and self-organized ring attractors in recurrent neural networks for continuous variable integration.Frontiers in network physiology · 2025Article
- I2Bot: an open-source tool for multi-modal and embodied simulation of insect navigation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Stem cell-specific ecdysone signaling regulates the development of dorsal fan-shaped body neurons and sleep homeostasis.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Article
- Parallel vector memories in the brain of a bee as foundation for flexible navigation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Continuously monitoring its position in space relative to a goal is one of the most essential tasks for an animal that moves through its environment. Species as diverse as rats, bees, and crabs achieve this by integrating all changes of direction with the distance covered during their foraging trips, a process called path integration. They generate an estimate of their current position relative to a starting point, enabling a straight-line return, following what is known as a home vector. While in theory path integration always leads the animal precisely back home, in the real world noise limits the usefulness of this strategy when operating in isolation. Noise results from stochastic processes in the nervous system and from unreliable sensory information, particularly when obtaining heading estimates. Path integration, during which angular self-motion provides the sole input for encoding heading (idiothetic path integration), results in accumulating errors that render this strategy useless over long distances. In contrast, when using an external compass this limitation is avoided (allothetic path integration). Many navigating insects indeed rely on external compass cues for estimating body orientation, whereas they obtain distance information by integration of steps or optic-flow-based speed signals. In the insect brain, a region called the central complex plays a key role for path integration. Not only does the central complex house a ring-attractor network that encodes head directions, neurons responding to optic flow also converge with this circuit. A neural substrate for integrating direction and distance into a memorized home vector has therefore been proposed in the central complex. We discuss how behavioral data and the theoretical framework of path integration can be aligned with these neural data.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.