Personal Information

Education

Research Interests

While the field of neuroscience is constantly developing new sophisticated methods to analyze neuronal activity, the methodologies to study the ultimate output of this activity – namely the behavior of the organism – remain decades behind. To date, many behavioral studies are either conducted in natural surroundings using quite primitive methods, or are conducted in controlled laboratory environments that are highly un-natural, using artificial tasks. The general goal of my work is to establish better quantitative and computational methods to study natural behavior focusing mainly on sensory behavior. I term this Neuroecology - understanding the animal’s behavior (determined by the brain) as it is driven by its natural environment.

Myotis myotis in a complex statistical world
(c) D. Nill

Echolocating bats can regulate almost all aspects of information acquisition what makes them fascinating to study active sensing : they can control acquisition timing, signal design and directionality. Because they emit the energy with which the sense their surroundings, one can record a bat from a distant (without even seeing it) and capture its behavior.

Rousettus aegyptiacus in flight

The active nature of echolocation also makes it one of the most tightly-controlled sensory systems. Most sensory systems allow some active control on the information acquired from the environment. Echolocating bats can regulate almost all aspects of information acquisition: they can control acquisition timing, signal design and directionality. Some of the questions I plan to work on include:

1. Behavioral strategies and sensory adaptations for optimal sensory acquisition: how does the animal move and operate its sensors in order to optimize information acquisition from the surroundings and how are the sensors adapted for this goal?

 

press to play

Egyptian fruit bats direct their beam such that the slope and not the peak falls on the object

 

2.  Representation of the world in the brain (using fMRI) : what is the role of experience and what is that of innateness in creating a sensory representation of the world in the brain? How do the representations of different sensory modalities (vision, auditory, olfactory) influence each other? And how plastic are all of the above?

 

press to play

legend: Greater mouse-eared in a classical two-alternative-choice experiment bats link:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8085477.stm

3.  Social behavior and swarming: we plan to follow long range navigating bats in the wild using GPSs and learn about swarm dynamics, information transfer between members of the colony and more.

  Myotis bechsteinii

(c) D. Nill

New technologies enable studying these complex behaviors in a quantitative manner for the first time. Some of these methods include: artificial SONAR to simulate bat echolocation, ultrasonic-microphone arrays to reconstruct bats’ emitted beams, mini-microphones mounted on the bat’s head to record the world as it receives it, mini-GPSs to record natural trajectories of bats in the wild and fMRI to study the representation of sensory information in the brain. All projects include an experimental work aside a modeling part.

Publications