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Dynamic Substrate for the Physical Encoding of Sensory Information in Bat Biosonar
Rolf Müller1, Anupam K Gupta1, Hongxiao Zhu2
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA.
Abstract:
Horseshoe bats have dynamic biosonar systems with interfaces for ultrasonic emission (reception) that change shape while diffracting the outgoing (incoming) sound waves. An information-theoretic analysis based on numerical and physical prototypes shows that these shape changes add sensory information (mutual information between distant shape conformations <20%), increase the number of resolvable directions of sound incidence, and improve the accuracy of direction finding. These results demonstrate that horseshoe bats have a highly effective substrate for dynamic encoding of sensory information.
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