Target search and discrimination 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 Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project focused on active sensing in echolocating marine mammals and humans. The MURI team 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 and learn robust, invariant representations of auditory objects in complex auditory scenes.

In Echospace, we undertake two interconnected components of this project:

• Model 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

• Conduct and analyze the coupled acoustic sampling and movement behaviors of an echolocating harbor porpoise in a target discrimination experiment

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