Like cartographers charting new lands on paper, bats sketch mental maps of spaces they fly through. But unlike cartographers — or rats, which researchers have studied walking across flat ...

The paper, by Michael Yartsev at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ, was titled, "Space Bats: Multidimensional Spatial Representation in the Bat." ...

Tom Kunz, a bat biologist at BU, is using LIDAR and 3D thermal imaging to monitor bats ... to expand this research and hopes to present a paper on it at the American Association for the ...

These head-direction cells track bats in three dimensions as they manoeuvre. The researchers think a similar 3D internal navigation system is likely to be found throughout the animal kingdom.

Recordings from the brains of bats as they flew in a lab have revealed that the animals have a "neural compass" which lets them keep track of exactly where, and even which way up they are.