Havens Hazel M, Taylor Brian K, Lohmann Kenneth J
Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA.
J R Soc Interface. 2025 Jun;22(227):20240810. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0810. Epub 2025 Jun 18.
While accurate engineered solutions to determine global position require vast networks of well-maintained transponder stations, many animals can solve this problem using only Earth's magnetic field. Moreover, animals are capable of this feat despite evidence suggesting that the magnetic sense operates at an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio. As such, this sense may provide valuable insights for the engineer. Here, we explore neuromorphic encoding strategies that may underlie this ability in animals and test their ability to accurately encode noisy magnetic information. We describe sparse encoding strategies that may function in this sense, with systems composed of as few as eight receptors and tens of neurons. We also find that neural architecture based on the arthropod central complex (implicated in other orientation tasks) is particularly robust to encoding noisy magnetic field information.
虽然精确的工程解决方案来确定全球位置需要庞大的维护良好的转发器站网络，但许多动物仅利用地球磁场就能解决这个问题。此外，尽管有证据表明磁感觉在极低的信噪比下运行，但动物仍能完成这一壮举。因此，这种感觉可能为工程师提供有价值的见解。在这里，我们探索可能是动物这种能力基础的神经形态编码策略，并测试它们准确编码嘈杂磁信息的能力。我们描述了可能在这种感觉中起作用的稀疏编码策略，其系统由少至八个感受器和数十个神经元组成。我们还发现，基于节肢动物中央复合体（与其他定向任务有关）的神经结构在编码嘈杂磁场信息方面特别稳健。
