Meeting Abstract
Several animals use properties of Earth’s magnetic field as a part of their navigation toolkit to accomplish tasks ranging from local homing to continental migration. Studying these behaviors has led to the postulation of both a magnetite-based sense, and a chemically based radical-pair mechanism. Several proposed models are aimed at both understanding these mechanisms, and offering insights into future physiological experiments. The present work mathematically implements and advances a previously developed conceptual model for sensing and processing magnetite-based magnetosensory feedback by using dynamic neural fields, a computational neuroscience tool for modeling nervous system dynamics and processing. The conceptual sensory model is implemented in both a computer simulation, and engineered hardware, and the same processing architecture is used to process data from both sensing paradigms. Results from the simulation and hardware both show qualitative agreement with each other, and are consistent with the conceptual model’s predictions, supporting the model’s plausibility. Specifically, a population of magnetoreceptors in which each individual can primarily sense directional information can encode magnetic intensity en masse, while multiple populations can encode both magnetic direction, and intensity. This work can serve both as an analysis and testing tool for biomagnetic reception, and as a design tool for developing new engineered systems.
