Sensation to navigation: a computational neuroscience approach to magnetic field navigation

Diverse taxa use Earth’s magnetic field (i.e., magnetoreception) as a guide during long-distance navigation. However, despite decades of research, specific sensory mechanisms of magnetoreception remain unconfirmed. Necessarily, this has led to theoretical and computational work developing hypotheses of how animals may navigate using magnetoreception. One hypothesized strategy relies on an animal using combinations of magnetic intensity and inclination as a kind of signature to identify a specific region or location. Using these signatures, animals could use a waypoint-based navigation strategy. We show that this navigation strategy is biologically plausible using a close approximation of neural processing to successfully guide an agent in a simulated magnetic field. Moreover, we accomplish this strategy using a processing approach previously utilized for mechanoreception, suggesting processing of Earth’s magnetic field may share features with the processing of other, more well-understood sensory systems. Taken together, our results suggest that both for the engineering of novel navigation systems and the study of animal magnetoreception, we should take lessons from other sensory systems.