Issues

Summary: Review of the past research and future prospects for understanding odour-based navigation behaviour by gastropods, covering behavioural patterns, navigational strategies and neural underpinnings.

Summary: This Review focuses on olfactory imprinting processes that numerous species use to recognize kin or their natal environment later in life.

Summary: New findings indicate that long-distance natal homing in salmon and sea turtles involves an ability to navigate back to the magnetic signature of the home area.

Summary: Insect behaviour can be explained as a combination of path integration, vector memory and view memory, but what is the evidence that these geometric capabilities form an integrated map?

Summary: This Review summarizes our understanding of the genetics and epigenetics of animal migration and outlines a vision to harness both technical advances and comparative approaches to move the field forward.

Summary: The behavioral evidence for Euclidean cognitive maps is unpersuasive. Recent experiments indicate that human spatial knowledge is better described by a labeled graph, which incorporates local distance and angle information.

Summary: We review new possibilities for monitoring the behaviour of wild animals in the field using on-board audio recordings.

Summary: This Review describes how virtual reality is used to study spatial navigation across species and discusses the benefits and challenges when using it in older age groups.

Summary: Neural circuits of the insect central complex are involved in guiding multiple navigation strategies, and the emerging core circuit for navigational decisions might provide an overarching framework of central-complex function.

Summary: In this Review, we describe how the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, uses the position of the sun and the pattern of polarized skylight to maintain a constant heading during long-distance dispersal flights.

Summary: Insights into the neural mechanisms underlying compass orientation in dung beetles are placed into the context of the mechanisms of other insects.

Summary: Path integration is one of the fundamental computations giving rise to the cognitive map and possibly other non-spatial representations in the hippocampal formation and its subcortical afferents.

Summary: Grid cells related to path integration and vision are explained as modulo projections of different cortical activities. The entorhinal cortex appears as a generic merging tool building hash codes.

Summary: Spatial development in humans takes a decade or more to unfold, and involves tuning initial systems in response to changing motor capacities and environmental feedback.

Summary: The human nose respires and sniffs yet current theory addresses only its respiratory function; the nose may also allow stereo olfaction and may have evolved for this in early Homo.