Can the Insect Path Integration Memory be a Bump Attractor?

Many animal species are able to return to their nest after a foraging excursion without using familiar visual cues to guide them. They accomplish this by using a navigation competence known as path integration, which is vital in environments that do not have prominent visual features. To perform path integration, an animal maintains an estimate of the distance and direction to its origin as it moves. The distance and direction information needs to be maintained in memory for the duration of the trip so that the animal can return to its nest. However, the neural substrate of this memory remains unclear. A common hypothesis is that the information is maintained in a bump attractor’s state. We test the bump attractor hypothesis and find that its predictions do not match behavioural data from ants, thus falsifying the bump attractor hypothesis and raising the need for alternative models of path integration memory.