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  • Article
    | Open Access

    How neural responses to boundaries develop in the subiculum remains unknown. Here authors show that the receptive fields of Boundary Vector Cells (neurons signalling vector displacement to boundaries) are altered by environment geometry, with directional tunings aligning with square arena walls, including during development.

    • Laurenz Muessig
    • , Fabio Ribeiro Rodrigues
    •  & Thomas J. Wills

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Inspired by insects in nature, the authors develop a neuromorphic robotic system with obstacle avoidance, tunnel centering and gap crossing capabilities. Their robotic system accomplishes these multiple capabilities by steering towards regions of low apparent motion.

    • Thorben Schoepe
    • , Ella Janotte
    •  & Elisabetta Chicca

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural coding of goal direction remains unclear in insects. Here, the authors describe goal-direction neurons in the monarch butterfly brain that specifically encode the insect’s desired flight direction during spatial orientation.

    • M. Jerome Beetz
    • , Christian Kraus
    •  & Basil el Jundi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flies navigate to food sources by combining odour and wind-direction cues. This study identifies pathways to the fan-shaped body that encode these signals, and demonstrates how local neurons integrate odour- and wind information to guide navigation.

    • Andrew M. M. Matheson
    • , Aaron J. Lanz
    •  & Katherine I. Nagel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many natural behaviours involve tracking of a target in space. Here, the authors describe a task to assess this behaviour in mice and use in vivo electrophysiology, calcium imaging, optogenetics, and chemogenetics to investigate the role of the striatum in target pursuit.

    • Namsoo Kim
    • , Haofang E. Li
    •  & Henry H. Yin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is known that Purkinje cell PKC-dependent depression is involved in the stabilization of self-motion based hippocampal representation. Here the authors describe decreased stability of hippocampal place cells based on allocentric cues in mice lacking Purkinje cell PP2B-dependent potentiation.

    • Julie Marie Lefort
    • , Jean Vincent
    •  & Christelle Rochefort

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Olfaction, the sense of smell, may have originally evolved to aid navigation in space, but there is no direct evidence of a link between olfaction and navigation in humans. Here the authors show that olfaction and spatial memory abilities are correlated and rely on similar brain regions in humans.

    • Louisa Dahmani
    • , Raihaan M. Patel
    •  & Véronique D. Bohbot

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multidimensional stimuli are often represented by neurons encoding only a single dimension and those encoding multiple dimensions. Here, the authors present theoretical and experimental analyses to show that mixed representations are optimal to efficiently encode such stimuli under different behavioral modes.

    • Arseny Finkelstein
    • , Nachum Ulanovsky
    •  & Johnatan Aljadeff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Advances in animal magnetoreception have been limited by a lack of tractable vertebrate laboratory models. Here, the authors demonstrate light-independent magnetoreception in mature zebrafish and medaka, as well as magnetosensitive locomotion in juvenile medaka associated with neuronal activation in the lateral hindbrain.

    • Ahne Myklatun
    • , Antonella Lauri
    •  & Gil G. Westmeyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active locomotion requires closed-loop sensorimotor co ordination between perception and action. Here the authors show using behavioural, imaging and modelling approaches that gaze orientation during phototaxis behaviour in larval zebrafish is related to oscillatory dynamics of a neuronal population in the hindbrain.

    • Sébastien Wolf
    • , Alexis M. Dubreuil
    •  & Georges Debrégeas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ellipsoid body (EB) neurons in the fruit fly represent the animal heading through a bump-like activity dynamics. Here the authors report a connectome-driven spiking neural circuit model of the EB and the protocerebral bridge (PB) that can maintain and update an activity bump related to the spatial orientation.

    • Ta-Shun Su
    • , Wan-Ju Lee
    •  & Chung-Chuan Lo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spatial navigation and memory depend on neural coding of an organism’s location as well as large-scale knowledge of the environment, but how animals organize information in task-relevant spatial segments is not well understood. Here the authors show that, in rats, perirhinal neurons perform integrative operations, globally specifying where, in the task context, an animal is located.

    • Jeroen J. Bos
    • , Martin Vinck
    •  & Cyriel M. A. Pennartz

  • Article |

    Echolocating bats possess an organized map of echo delay in the auditory cortex. Bartenstein et al. investigate the influence of echo-acoustic flow information on the organization of the cortical map, and find that dynamic adaptation of the map is dependent on situation-specific sensory input.

    • Sophia K. Bartenstein
    • , Nadine Gerstenberg
    •  & Uwe Firzlaff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrating stereo information from two eyes or two ears is fundamental to localizing visual and auditory stimuli. Kenneth Catania investigates the olfactory sensitivity of eastern American moles, and finds that they use bilateral chemosensory cues in combination with serial sampling to localize odorants.

    • Kenneth C. Catania

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