Project description
Neural representation of space in bumblebees
Cognitive maps, topological representations of places stored in the brain, often guide navigating animals. Bees navigate impressively, likely relying on much simpler strategies, such as remembering directions together with visual scenes rather than map-like representations. However, how places are stored in the insect brain remains unclear. The ERC-funded BeeSpace project will study the neural basis of insect navigation through neural recordings from freely walking bumblebees. By leveraging advanced recording techniques, the project’s goal is to search for spatial cells that may share tuning characteristics with hippocampal cells described in vertebrates. The anticipated results may provide important insights into the design of autonomously navigating vehicles.
Objective
With ease, we daily navigate through our places of residence. From any familiar place, we can compute the shortest route to our workplace or to our favorite coffee shop. Additionally, we can flexibly adjust our route, if a road is suddenly blocked. This flexibility in route planning is based on a topological representation of different places in our brain (cognitive map). While place cells, a neuronal substrate of cognitive maps, have been identified in diverse species across the vertebrate lineage, a cognitive map is highly contentious in insects. Among insects, bees, especially, demonstrate remarkable navigational feats including taking novel shortcuts, which requires a highly sophisticated spatial memory. Given their limited neural bandwidth, it is likely that insects use computationally less demanding navigational strategies compared to a cognitive map. Such strategies have been implicated in the ‘insect base model’ which is centered on remembering vectors bound to views of the terrestrial landscape. Although this model can explain many behavioral findings in navigating insects, the underlying neural mechanisms are not entirely understood. Due to technical constraints of monitoring brain activity in freely moving insects, it is unclear how space is represented in the insect brain. With neural recordings from freely foraging bees, I recently identified cells exhibiting a spatial tuning that strikingly resembles the one of vertebrate place cells. These ground-breaking findings represent the foundation for my proposal to study the neural basis of insect navigation. The cutting-edge recording techniques, which I recently developed, will enable me to gain unprecedented insights into how the insect solves navigational tasks. Understanding how insects navigate through their home terrain with numerically simpler neural circuits, will help us to reveal innovative ways to design autonomously navigating vehicles.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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97070 Wuerzburg
Germany
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