Sonar-guided attention in natural tasks

Little is known about neural dynamics that accompany rapid shifts in spatial attention in freely behaving animals, primarily because reliable, fine scale indicators of attention are lacking in standard model organisms engaged in natural tasks. The echolocating bat can serve to bridge this gap, as it exhibits robust dynamic behavioral indicators of spatial attention while it explores its environment. In particular, the bat actively shifts the aim of its sonar beam to inspect objects in different directions, akin to eye movements and foveation in humans and other visually dominant animals. Further, the bat adjusts the temporal features of sonar calls to attend to objects at different distances, yielding a direct metric of acoustic gaze along the range axis. Thus, an echolocating bat’s call features not only convey the information it uses to probe its surroundings, but also reveal its auditory attention to objects in 3D space. These explicit metrics of spatial attention provide a powerful and robust system for analyzing changes in attention at a behavioral level, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms.