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Updated: Feb 10, 2026

Tissue Collection of Bats for -Omics Analyses and Primary Cell Culture
Published on: October 23, 2019
Social place-cells in the bat hippocampus
David B Omer, Shir R Maimon, Liora Las
1Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. nachum.ulanovsky@weizmann.ac.il liora.las@weizmann.ac.il.
Abstract:
Social animals have to know the spatial positions of conspecifics. However, it is unknown how the position of others is represented in the brain. We designed a spatial observational-learning task, in which an observer bat mimicked a demonstrator bat while we recorded hippocampal dorsal-CA1 neurons from the observer bat. A neuronal subpopulation represented the position of the other bat, in allocentric coordinates. About half of these "social place-cells" represented also the observer's own position-that is, were place cells. The representation of the demonstrator bat did not reflect self-movement or trajectory planning by the observer. Some neurons represented also the position of inanimate moving objects; however, their representation differed from the representation of the demonstrator bat. This suggests a role for hippocampal CA1 neurons in social-spatial cognition.
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