Background

Bats can offer important insight into the neural computations underlying complex forms of navigation. Up to now, this had been done with the confound of the human experimenter being present in the same environment the bat was navigating in.

New Method

We, therefore, developed a novel behavioral setup, the fully automated bat (FAB) flight room, to obtain a detailed and quantitative understanding of bat navigation flight behavior while studying its relevant neural circuits, but importantly without human intervention. As a demonstration of the FAB flight room utility we trained bats on a four-target, visually-guided, foraging task and recorded neural activity from the retrosplenial cortex (RSC).

Results

We find that bats can be efficiently trained and engaged in complex, multi-target, visuospatial behavior in the FAB flight room. Wireless neural recordings from the bat RSC during the task confirm the multiplexed characteristics of single RSC neurons encoding spatial positional information, target selection, reward obtainment and the intensity of visual cues used to guide navigation.

Comparison with Existing Methods

In contrast to the methods introduced in previous studies, we now can investigate spatial navigation in bats without potential experimental biases that can be easily introduced by active physical involvement and presence of experimenters in the room.

Conclusions

Combined, we describe a novel experimental approach for studying spatial navigation in freely flying bats and provide support for the involvement of bat RSC in aerial visuospatial foraging behavior.

中文翻译：

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完整标题：全自动蝙蝠（FAB）飞行室：用于研究飞行蝙蝠导航及其在压后皮层的初步应用的无人环境

 背景

蝙蝠可以为复杂导航形式背后的神经计算提供重要的见解。到目前为止，这项工作是在人类实验者与蝙蝠所处的环境相同的情况下完成的。

 新方法

因此，我们开发了一种新颖的行为设置，即全自动蝙蝠（FAB）飞行室，以便在研究其相关神经回路的同时，详细而定量地了解蝙蝠导航飞行行为，但重要的是无需人工干预。作为 FAB 飞行室实用程序的演示，我们训练蝙蝠执行四目标、视觉引导的觅食任务，并记录压后皮层 (RSC) 的神经活动。

 结果

我们发现蝙蝠可以在 FAB 飞行室中得到有效的训练并参与复杂的、多目标的视觉空间行为。任务期间来自蝙蝠 RSC 的无线神经记录证实了单个 RSC 神经元编码空间位置信息、目标选择、奖励获取和用于引导导航的视觉线索强度的多重特征。

与现有方法的比较

与之前研究中引入的方法相比，我们现在可以研究蝙蝠的空间导航，而不会产生潜在的实验偏差，而这些偏差很容易通过积极的身体参与和实验者在房间中的存在而引入。

 结论

结合起来，我们描述了一种研究自由飞行蝙蝠空间导航的新颖实验方法，并为蝙蝠 RSC 参与空中视觉空间觅食行为提供支持。