ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Echolocating bats accumulate information from acoustic snapshots to predict auditory object motion.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Natural auditory behaviors invoke cognitive brain networks.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Unpredictable prey motion shapes behavior across time scales.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Sensorimotor dynamics of target acquisition and homing in human echolocation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Energy Expenditure Optimization in the Echolocation ofBiology · 2026Article
- Perception and neural representation of intermittent odor stimuli in mice.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Evidence Accumulation in Human Click-Based Echolocation.eNeuro · 2026Article
- Article
- Auditory object representation in the bat hippocampus.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Rapid sensorimotor adaptation to auditory midbrain silencing in free-flying bats.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- SonoNERFs: Neural Radiance Fields Applied to Biological Echolocation Systems Allow 3D Scene Reconstruction through Perceptual Prediction.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Flexible control of vocal timing in Carollia perspicillata bats enables escape from acoustic interference.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Adaptive echolocation behavior of bats and toothed whales in dynamic soundscapes.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Sensory error drives fine motor adjustment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Analysis of echolocation behavior of bats in "echo space" using acoustic simulation.BMC biology · 2022Article
- Spatial attention in natural tasks [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations].Molecular psychology : brain, behavior, and society · 2022Article
- Echolocating toothed whales use ultra-fast echo-kinetic responses to track evasive prey.eLife · 2021Article
- Bat target tracking strategies for prey interception.Communicative & integrative biology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Unlike other predators that use vision as their primary sensory system, bats compute the three-dimensional (3D) position of flying insects from discrete echo snapshots, which raises questions about the strategies they employ to track and intercept erratically moving prey from interrupted sensory information. Here, we devised an ethologically inspired behavioral paradigm to directly test the hypothesis that echolocating bats build internal prediction models from dynamic acoustic stimuli to anticipate the future location of moving auditory targets. We quantified the direction of the bat's head/sonar beam aim and echolocation call rate as it tracked a target that moved across its sonar field and applied mathematical models to differentiate between nonpredictive and predictive tracking behaviors. We discovered that big brown bats accumulate information across echo sequences to anticipate an auditory target's future position. Further, when a moving target is hidden from view by an occluder during a portion of its trajectory, the bat continues to track its position using an internal model of the target's motion path. Our findings also reveal that the bat increases sonar call rate when its prediction of target trajectory is violated by a sudden change in target velocity. This shows that the bat rapidly adapts its sonar behavior to update internal models of auditory target trajectories, which would enable tracking of evasive prey. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the echolocating big brown bat integrates acoustic snapshots over time to build prediction models of a moving auditory target's trajectory and enable prey capture under conditions of uncertainty.
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