Abstract
The central complex of the insect midbrain is thought to coordinate insect guidance strategies. Computational models can account for specific behaviours, but their applicability across sensory and task domains remains untested. Here, we assess the capacity of our previous model (Sun et al. 2020) of visual navigation to generalise to olfactory navigation and its coordination with other guidance in flies and ants. We show that fundamental to this capacity is the use of a biologically plausible neural copy-and-shift mechanism that ensures sensory information is presented in a format compatible with the insect steering circuit regardless of its source. Moreover, the same mechanism is shown to allow the transfer cues from unstable/egocentric to stable/geocentric frames of reference, providing a first account of the mechanism by which foraging insects robustly recover from environmental disturbances. We propose that these circuits can be flexibly repurposed by different insect navigators to address their unique ecological needs.
Highlights
It has been proposed that the repertoire of robust navigation behaviours displayed by insects (Webb and Wystrach, 2016; Wehner, 2019) can be traced to the well conserved brain region known as the central complex (CX) (Honkanen et al, 2019; Hulse et al, 2021)
The animal will continue on its current heading until an undesirable change in sensory valence is experienced at which point the shift mechanism will create an offset between the current and desired headings causing the steering circuit to initiate a change of direction
We revealed how ring attractor circuits (Touretzky, 2005; Sun et al, 2018) that we hypothesise exist in the fan-shaped body provide an ideal substrate for optimally integrating cues that exist within a shared context
Summary
It has been proposed that the repertoire of robust navigation behaviours displayed by insects (Webb and Wystrach, 2016; Wehner, 2019) can be traced to the well conserved brain region known as the central complex (CX) (Honkanen et al, 2019; Hulse et al, 2021). We provide the first account of how the central complex could transfer orientation cues from an egocentric to a geocentric frame of reference which we propose can enhance the robustness of navigation
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