ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Echolocating bats rely on an innate speed-of-sound reference.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Novel Progress in Bat Biological Research: Evolution, Physiology, Behavior and Conservation.Biology · 2026Article
- Ventral wing hairs provide tactile feedback for aerial prey capture in the big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2024Article
- Realizing the gravity of the simulation: adaptation to simulated hypogravity leads to altered predictive control.Frontiers in physiology · 2024Article
- Hearing, echolocation, and beam steering from day 0 in tongue-clicking bats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Adaptive learning and recall of motor-sensory sequences in adult echolocating bats.BMC biology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Animals must encode fundamental physical relationships in their brains. A heron plunging its head underwater to skewer a fish must correct for light refraction, an archerfish shooting down an insect must "consider" gravity, and an echolocating bat that is attacking prey must account for the speed of sound in order to assess its distance. Do animals learn these relations or are they encoded innately and can they adjust them as adults are all open questions. We addressed this question by shifting the speed of sound and assessing the sensory behavior of a bat species that naturally experiences different speeds of sound. We found that both newborn pups and adults are unable to adjust to this shift, suggesting that the speed of sound is innately encoded in the bat brain. Moreover, our results suggest that bats encode the world in terms of time and do not translate time into distance. Our results shed light on the evolution of innate and flexible sensory perception.
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