These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Detection of jitter in intertarget spacing by the big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus.
    Author: Masters WM, Raver KA, Kornacker K, Burnett SC.
    Journal: J Comp Physiol A; 1997 Sep; 181(3):279-90. PubMed ID: 9309868.
    Abstract:
    We trained bats to detect intertarget jitter, i.e., relative motion between two virtual (electronically synthesized) targets. Both targets were themselves moving with respect to nearby objects (e.g., the microphone and speaker used to create the virtual targets) so that the only reliable cue available to the bats was variation in intertarget spacing. Given a target at 80 cm and another at 95, 110 or 125 cm, the threshold for intertarget jitter (ITJ) of the two bats tested was < 10 microseconds, corresponding to < 1.7 mm of range. When, for one bat, we increased the range instability of the targets by adding varying amounts of random range shift to the target complex (while preserving the correct intertarget spacing), ITJ threshold worsened. When we presented three targets, one of which was jittering, the bat's threshold improved to 0.9 microsecond (equivalent to 0.16 mm). If no second target was presented, i.e., if the task was to detect jitter added to a single moving target, then bats' jitter threshold was very high (> 200 microseconds). Eptesicus fuscus appears to be very good at detecting changes in intertarget spacing, which might prove valuable for detecting targets moving relative to the background or for constructing a spatial image of a complex environment.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]