Event:

Both animals and humans move daily through complex three-dimensional (3D) environments, yet very little is known about the encoding of 3D head direction in the brain. Moreover, it remains unclear how neural circuits represent direction to spatial goals – which is essential for goal-directed navigation. The Egyptian fruit bat, a flying mammal with exceptional goal-directed behaviors, is a novel animal model that is well suited for addressing these two open questions.
In the first part of the talk, I will present the first neural recordings of 3D head-direction cells from the mammalian brain – specifically, from the hippocampal formation of flying and crawling bats, and will discuss the functional organization and the surprising properties of these neurons.
In the second part, I will describe our recent findings that suggest the existence of goal-direction and goal-proximity signals in the bat hippocampus – a vectorial representation that could support goal-directed navigation.