Bats navigate with cognitive maps (as do hummingbirds)

[JacksinPA]

Bats navigate with cognitive maps | Science

A cognitive map can allow an animal to navigate from its current position to an undetected goal. There is a long-standing, ongoing debate about which animals have and use cognitive maps (1–3). On pages 188 and 194 of this issue, Toledo et al. (4) and Harten et al. (5), respectively, show that Egyptian fruit bats (see the figure) use cognitive maps, as evidenced by taking previously unused shortcuts. These are movements between two known sites that are beyond detectable range of one another. Shortcuts are strong evidence of cognitive maps.
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I have a hummingbird feeder & through a simple but unplanned experiment I found that these birds also navigate by using congnitive maps. They do circuits to visit the many feeders in the neighborhood. I moved the feeder to a different location of my porch, no more than 5 feet away from the original position. A hummingbird appeared at the old location, stopped & departed, not even looking at the nearby feeder. So their maps of the locations of feeders is very precise as to their locations.

 

[MamboDervish]

Bats navigate with cognitive maps | Science

A cognitive map can allow an animal to navigate from its current position to an undetected goal. There is a long-standing, ongoing debate about which animals have and use cognitive maps (1–3). On pages 188 and 194 of this issue, Toledo et al. (4) and Harten et al. (5), respectively, show that Egyptian fruit bats (see the figure) use cognitive maps, as evidenced by taking previously unused shortcuts. These are movements between two known sites that are beyond detectable range of one another. Shortcuts are strong evidence of cognitive maps.
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I have a hummingbird feeder & through a simple but unplanned experiment I found that these birds also navigate by using congnitive maps. They do circuits to visit the many feeders in the neighborhood. I moved the feeder to a different location of my porch, no more than 5 feet away from the original position. A hummingbird appeared at the old location, stopped & departed, not even looking at the nearby feeder. So their maps of the locations of feeders is very precise as to their locations.

I just moved a hummingbird feeder today, less than 3 feet away, further out on a tree limb, but still in plain sight. I was away less than a minute when a local ruby throated went straight for it. Some hours later, at dusk, it was getting its usual evening traffic. My experience is that they often flit about quite capriciously, and the fact that yours "stopped and departed, not even looking at the nearby feeder" is no less likely a behavior than might happen at any time, even if the feeder had not been moved.

This is not to dismiss the possibility that they use cognitive maps, but I suspect confirming that might involve a bit more experimentation and observation than what you've expressed. The fact is, they do manage to find feeders they've never seen before at any time, so their senses in that regard are not programmed at all. They must always be looking for feeders.

 

[Aletheia]

Kind of off topic, but did you know blind people can see through their tongue sensory mechanisms(with appropriate apparatus)? Saw that years ago, and it was pretty weird, but showed us a lot about generality of neural networks.