A model for navigational errors in complex environmental fields

Many animals are believed to navigate using environmental signals such as light, sound, odours and magnetic fields. However, animals rarely navigate directly to their target location, but instead make a series of navigational errors which are corrected during transit. In previous work, we introduced a model showing that differences between an animal׳s 'cognitive map' of the environmental signals used for navigation and the true nature of these signals caused a systematic pattern in orientation errors when navigation begins. The model successfully predicted the pattern of errors seen in previously collected data from homing pigeons, but underestimated the amplitude of the errors. In this paper, we extend our previous model to include more complicated distortions of the contour lines of the environmental signals. Specifically, we consider the occurrence of critical points in the fields describing the signals. We consider three scenarios and compute orientation errors as parameters are varied in each case. We show that the occurrence of critical points can be associated with large variations in initial orientation errors over a small geographic area. We discuss the implications that these results have on predicting how animals will behave when encountering complex distortions in any environmental signals they use to navigate.