Sinzinger, Ronja

Like many social insects, bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are known to be central place foragers, i.e. they go on foraging flights to later return to their nest entrance. Therefore, they use path integration as a navigational strategy to successfully navigate between the hive and food sources even throughout rather complex environments. To do so, they continuously perceive and process both the travelled distance and direction. In my project, I aim to investigate the motion-coding properties of central complex neurons using intracellular recordings combined with a virtual reality approach. The goal is to further characterize motion-coding neurons and to further unravel the neural mechanisms underlying distance coding.

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