How sensory input is integrated to steer straight

All animal navigators are faced with the challenging task of making sense of multiple directional cues to steer their desired course.

But due to variable terrain, unpredictable weather conditions and the time of day, these sensory cues typically fluctuate drastically in relevance, availability, and salience along a single journey.

Clearly, insects and other animals have somehow solved this problem via millions of years of evolution, but we are presently only at the threshold of understanding how navigating animals detect and integrate the multitude of sensory cues available to them to find their way.

The goal of this project is to define WHEN, WHERE and HOW sensory information is integrated by an insect brain to support reliable orientation.

This will be realized through a bold fusion of several new approaches from biology, bioinformatics and mathematics.While the challenge of dynamic cue integration has been solved effectively in the compass network of my model system - the ball-rolling dung-beetles - it remains a key problem within the fields of cognition and perception, as well as for thedesign of artificial intelligence systems.

In revealing the solutions that insects employ to compensate for the sensory and computational challenges imposed by fluctuating directional input, I can therefore impact the advancement of science well outside the field of biology.