School of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, 6997801 Tel Aviv, Israel;
Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society Graduate Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03766.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 May 11;118(19). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2024352118.
Animals must encode fundamental physical relationships in their brains. A heron plunging its head underwater to skewer a fish must correct for light refraction, an archerfish shooting down an insect must "consider" gravity, and an echolocating bat that is attacking prey must account for the speed of sound in order to assess its distance. Do animals learn these relations or are they encoded innately and can they adjust them as adults are all open questions. We addressed this question by shifting the speed of sound and assessing the sensory behavior of a bat species that naturally experiences different speeds of sound. We found that both newborn pups and adults are unable to adjust to this shift, suggesting that the speed of sound is innately encoded in the bat brain. Moreover, our results suggest that bats encode the world in terms of time and do not translate time into distance. Our results shed light on the evolution of innate and flexible sensory perception.
动物必须在大脑中对基本物理关系进行编码。为了刺穿水下的鱼，苍鹭必须纠正光的折射；射水鱼为了击落昆虫必须“考虑”重力；而一只发出回声定位的蝙蝠在攻击猎物时必须考虑到声速，以评估其距离。动物是学习这些关系还是天生就编码这些关系，以及它们是否可以在成年后调整这些关系，这些都是悬而未决的问题。我们通过改变声速并评估一种自然经历不同声速的蝙蝠物种的感觉行为来解决这个问题。我们发现，新生幼崽和成年蝙蝠都无法适应这种变化，这表明声速在蝙蝠的大脑中是天生编码的。此外，我们的结果表明，蝙蝠根据时间来编码世界，而不是将时间转化为距离。我们的研究结果为先天和灵活的感觉感知的进化提供了线索。
