Finger, N. M. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2026

Bats decouple sonar gaze from steering to resolve sensory conflict

When sensory modalities yield conflicting information, animals must rapidly reassess stimuli to select their actions. We induced auditory-visual conflict in free-flying echolocating Egyptian fruit bats, by fitting animals with prisms that shifted the perceived visual location of a landing perch while echoes returned from its veridical location. Bats that course-corrected within a single goal-directed flight did so by decoupling sonar gaze from steering, to enable rapid reweighting of visual and auditory cues. We designed artificial agents that used Bayesian inference to construct estimates of goal locations in their environment. When competing estimates directed active-sensing behaviors distinctly from steering, agents course-corrected more rapidly. Consistent with this idea, when bats were fit with prisms and earplugs that attenuated auditory localization cues, they were unable to course-correct. Removing prisms produced no systematic after-effects. Our framework suggests that instead of correcting their behavior after failure, animals could efficiently employ active sensing to resolve sensory conflict before failure occurs. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=178 SRC="FIGDIR/small/743555v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (41K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e9374aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@12d03bforg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@5109d2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@5bbb2e_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG O_FLOATNOCover figure.C_FLOATNO Bat wearing helmet with clear-glasses and tracking markers. Photograph (C) 2026 Nikita M. Finger / Moss Laboratory. C_FIG

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Why do bats fly into cave doors? Inattentional blindness in echolocating animals

Echolocating bats can navigate complex 3D environments by integrating prior knowledge of spatial layouts and real-time sensory cues. This study demonstrates that inattentional blindness to sensory information undermines successful navigation in Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, a species that has access to vision and echolocation to traverse natural environments. Bats flew over repeated trials to a perch at a fixed location in the light, allowing them to navigate using both vision and echolocation. The experiment was then repeated in the dark to exclude the bats use of vision. The perch was subsequently displaced by either 15 or 30 cm in one of six different directions (up, down, left, right, front, back). Echolocation behavior was recorded using a 25-channel microphone array, while flight paths were tracked using 13 motion capture cameras. The directional aim of echolocation clicks served as a metric for the bats spatial attention to locations in their environment. In the light, bats modified their flight paths to successfully land on a perch that was moved 15 cm but surprisingly, often failed to land on it when displaced by 30 cm. In the dark, bats often failed to land on the perch after it was moved by only 15 cm. Landing failures suggest that learned spatial priors invoked inattentional blindness to changes in the environment, which interfered with successful navigation. In both the light and dark, when bats failed to land on the perch at its new location, they directed their attention toward the original perch position. Performance differences in the light and dark suggest that the bats attentional spotlight may be narrower when it relies on echolocation than vision. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first evidence of inattentional blindness in a flying echolocating animal, demonstrating that spatial priors can dominate sensory processing during navigation.

animal behavior and cognition↗