Mapping, manipulating, and modelling the audiovisual circuitry for spatial navigation

Mice will navigate a virtual reality world of sights and sounds while researchers track and manipulate their brain activity in real time. The brain combines information from different senses to guide movement through space, but the neural circuits that merge hearing and vision for navigation remain unknown. Most studies have examined auditory or visual navigation separately, leaving a gap in understanding how the brain fuses these signals during real-world movement. This project addresses that gap by developing a new behavioural task in which mice learn to find a reward zone using only audiovisual cues, then systematically altering those cues to infer the brain’s integration strategy. This is fundamental curiosity-driven research. It will map the specific brain regions and connections that enable audiovisual navigation, using optogenetics to test causality and large-scale electrophysiology to record neural activity across multiple areas simultaneously. If successful, it will reveal whether the brain uses general principles for combining sight and sound across different behaviours—or whether navigation relies on specialised circuits. Such foundational knowledge could eventually inform the design of sensory prosthetics or navigation aids for people with hearing or vision loss, but those applications remain distant. For now, the work clarifies a basic mechanism of how brains build a coherent spatial world from multiple senses.