Israeli studies have found that bats navigate with "cognitive maps."

Bats have superior navigational capabilities, how do they fly dozens of kilometers in a matter of hours for food, and then return to the starting point accurately? Israeli researchers have found that bats have spatial memory capabilities similar to those of humans, and can use markers to create "cognitive maps" of surrounding space and navigate themthe ability of bats to use sound waves to distinguish near objects is well known, and how they navigate on a larger geographic scale as they travel to distant foraging have attracted two Israeli teams to study itone team from Tel Aviv University and the other by researchers from the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, both of which published papers in the new issue of the journal Science on Mondayin a study at Tel Aviv University, researchers tracked 22 fruit bats and developed a small GPS device to track how they forage in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area at different stages, from childhood to adulthoodanalysis shows that the fruit bats navigate in a similar way to Tel Aviv residents, using landmarkbuildings such as the Azrli Tower in the city to create a visual "cognitive map" of the surrounding spacestrong evidence that they have a human-like "copying" ability, and when these fruit bats develop to a certain stage, they can use "cognitive maps" in the brain to find routes that have never been taken, closer to their destinationin a study conducted by the Hebrew University in collaboration with Tel Aviv University, the team tracked wild Egyptian fruit bats foraging in Israel's Hula Valleyresearchers have also developed an advanced location tracking system that collected flight data on 172 wild Egyptian fruit bats foraging at night over a four-year periodthe team combined with the relevant area fruit tree distribution map and other information analysis found that the bats using advanced spatial memory, based on fruit trees and other markers to establish a "cognitive map" and thus navigationthey rarely look for food at random, but repeatedly "fly" through target-oriented long-distance "direct" foraging, and frequently "copy the road."researchers say the results provide the most comprehensive evidence yet of the existence of "cognitive maps" in the wild brain()