Modeling target search by echolocating toothed whales

Echolocating animals effortlessly navigate, hunt, and interact with their environment, despite cluttered and noisy return signals. Blind expert human echolocators prove that this capacity does not depend exclusively on biological specializations unique to particular species. This project is an integrated component of a larger collaborative project (see funding below) focused on active sensing in echolocating marine mammals and humans. The overarching goal of the interdisciplinary team is to use both toothed whales (odontocetes) and humans as model systems to identify the neural mechanisms that extract echo-acoustic information and the brain networks that build robust, invariant representations of auditory objects in complex auditory scenes. The UW-APL component of the project involves modeling the echolocation-based target search by toothed whales as an information-seeking behavior by extending the infotaxis algorithm originally formulated in moth odor tracking problems into an active sensing context. In parallel with the theoretical work, we also conducted an echolocation target discrimination experiment with a harbor porpoise to guide further model development.

Funding agency: Office of Naval Research – Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI)