Topic: head direction

Insects demonstrate a remarkable ability to navigate the world -- foraging for food and returning to their nests over large distances. Simple neural circuits have been shown to underlie insect navigation behaviours, encoding the animal's head direction and velocity vector as a sinusoidal activity pattern\cite{heinze2007maplike,lyuBuildingAllocentricTravelling2022}. We offer novel mathematical insights into the benefits of this sinusoidal encoding, suggesting that it might offer an evolutionary advantage in terms of noise resilience. Previous work has recognised that encoding vectors as sinusoi

The navigational behavior of many animals relies on internal representations of space. These representations are often encoded in a world-centric (allocentric) reference frame. To use these representations to guide behavior, animals must transform them to a body-centric (egocentric) reference frame. We took advantage of the experimental tractability of Drosophila melanogaster to determine how neurons in its brain perform this computation. In the fly brain, directions are encoded as vectors in an allocentric reference frame by neurons in a region called the central complex. We investigated whet

Humans and social animals interpret the body language of others to infer intentions and adjust their actions instantaneously. To explore neural representations of conspecific kinematics during goal-directed behavior, we trained pairs of freely moving mice to jointly perform a two-alternative forced-choice task. The mice had to discriminate the location of a visual grating to earn water rewards. Using high-speed videography, we showed that mice engage in stereotypical trajectories from the trial initiation site to the chosen reward lick port across hundreds of trials. By decomposing movement in