How the insect central complex could coordinate multimodal navigation.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Biology
• Animal Behavior

Background:

• The insect central complex coordinates navigation, but models often focus on single sensory modalities.
• Generalizability of computational models across diverse sensory inputs and tasks is largely untested.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the generalizability of a computational model of visual navigation to olfactory navigation in insects.
• To investigate how sensory information is integrated and transformed for navigation across different modalities and reference frames.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a previously developed computational model (Sun et al. 2020) of insect visual navigation.
• Extended the model to incorporate olfactory navigation and its coordination with other guidance strategies.
• Assessed the model's performance in simulating navigation behaviors in flies and ants.

Main Results:

• A biologically plausible neural 'copy-and-shift' mechanism is crucial for sensory information compatibility with insect steering circuits.
• This mechanism facilitates the transfer of cues between egocentric and geocentric frames of reference.
• The model successfully accounts for robust recovery from environmental disturbances in foraging insects.

Conclusions:

• The 'copy-and-shift' mechanism provides a unified explanation for cross-modal navigation and frame-of-reference transformations.
• Insect navigation circuits are flexible and can be repurposed for diverse ecological needs.
• This work advances our understanding of insect guidance strategies and computational neuroscience.