Cognitive map–based navigation in wild bats revealed by a new high-throughput tracking system

Abstract

Knowing their way around The presence of a cognitive map is essential to our ability to navigate through areas we know because it facilitates the use of spatial knowledge to derive new routes. Whether such maps exist in nonhuman animals has been debated, largely because of the difficulty of demonstrating qualifying components of the map outside of a laboratory. In two studies on Egyptian fruit bats, Harten et al. and Toledo et al. together show that this species's navigational strategies meet the requirements for the use of a cognitive map of their environment, confirming that this skill occurs outside of humans (see the Perspective by Fenton). Science , this issue p. 194 , p. 188 ; see also p. 142