Publications
What the night shift found: selected publications, from hippocampal codes in flight to interacting brains. For the complete record, see Google Scholar →
The Philosophy in Print
Why the brain cannot be understood through a handful of standard model organisms: the case for studying neuroscience across the diversity of the animal kingdom.
Yartsev · Science · 2017 → II · The QuestionA paradigm shift from strict reductionism toward embracing complexity and diversity: principles for intelligent behavior and learning in the natural world are within reach.
Forli & Yartsev · Cell · 2024 → III · The BehaviorEnvironmental realism alone does not guarantee natural behavior: what matters is what the animal is actually doing, and whether the setting affords the behaviors it evolved to perform.
Yartsev · Nature Neuroscience · 2026 →A Two-Dimensional Grid-Cell Code for Three-Dimensional Navigation in Freely Flying Bats
Kevin K Qi, Michael M Yartsev
Grid cells in freely flying bats preserve a two-dimensional toroidal code that aligns with the planar structure of flight paths, offering a parsimonious solution for navigating three-dimensional space.
Motor Cortical Computations Underlying Natural Dexterous Movement in Freely Flying Bats
Boaz Styr, Kevin K. Qi, Xing Chen, William A. Liberti III and Michael M. Yartsev
The wing motor cortex of freely flying bats operates in a high-dimensional regime, with sparsely active neurons combining mixed kinematic selectivity and millisecond-precise entrainment to the wingbeat.
Ultrafast Frame-Free Imaging of Neural Activity with Event Cameras
Angelo Forli†, Krishna Chaitanya Kasuba†, Katharine Henn, Deborah Lee, Miriam Hernández-Morales, Chunlei Liu, Evan Miller, and Michael M. Yartsev († Equal contribution)
Event cameras report fluorescence changes as sparse asynchronous events rather than frames, resolving single action potentials at kilohertz rates and opening a new path toward large-scale voltage imaging in freely behaving, even flying, animals.
Natural behavior is what you do, not just where you are
Yartsev, M.M.
Naturalistic environments can create an illusion of ecological relevance: studying natural behavior demands an ethological focus on what animals actually do, not only on where experiments take place.
Replay and representation dynamics in the hippocampus of freely flying bats
Angelo Forli, Wudi Fan, Kevin K. Qi, Michael M. Yartsev
Hippocampal ensembles in flying bats replay entire flight trajectories at rest and sweep ahead of the animal in flight, locked to the wing-beat rhythm rather than theta oscillations.
Understanding the Neural Basis of Natural Intelligence
Angelo Forli & Michael M Yartsev
Understanding natural intelligence requires moving beyond strict reductionism: new tools now give access to neural dynamics and behavior across timescales, contexts, and species, bringing real-world principles within reach.
Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit-bat
Julie E Elie, Sandra E Muroy, Daria Genzel, Tong Na, Lisa A Beyer, Donald L Swiderski, Yehoash Raphael & Michael M Yartsev
A subset of the Egyptian fruit bat vocal repertoire requires auditory feedback to develop, and the affected vocalizations differ between males and females, revealing sexually dimorphic vocal learning.
Neural Representation of Human Experimenters in the Bat Hippocampus
Madeleine C. Snyder, Kevin K. Qi & Michael M. Yartsev
Hippocampal neurons in bats encode the presence, position, and identity of human experimenters, indicating that researchers themselves shape the neural dynamics of the animals they study: a gentle case for letting animals behave naturally, without a human in the room.
Vocal Learning-Associated Convergent Evolution in Mammalian Proteins and Regulatory Elements
Morgan E. Wirthlin^, Tobias A. Schmid^, Julie E. Elie^, Xiaomeng Zhang, Varvara A. Shvareva, Ashley Rakuljuc, Maria B. Ji, Ninad S. Bhat, Irene M. Kaplow, Daniel E. Schaffer, Alyssa J. Lawler, Siddharth Annaldasula, Byungkook Lim, Eiman Azim, Zoonomia Consortium, Wynn K. Meter, Michael M. Yartsev*, Andreas P. Pfenning* (^ co-first authors, * co-last & corresponding authors)
Comparative genomics across 215 mammals, anchored by a newly identified vocal motor cortical region in Egyptian fruit bats, implicates convergent losses of motor cortex regulatory elements in vocal learning evolution.
Hippocampal Representation During Collective Spatial Behavior in Bats
Angelo Forli & Michael M. Yartsev
In groups of bats engaged in collective spatial behavior, hippocampal neurons are tuned to conspecific presence, shared locations, individual identities, and sensory signals broadcast within the group.
Natural behavior is the language of the brain
Cory T. Miller, David Gire, Kim Hoke, Alexander C. Huk, Darcy Kelley, David A. Leopold, Matthew C. Smear, Frederic Theunissen, Michael Yartsev, Cristopher M. Niell
A roadmap for grounding neuroscience in naturally occurring behavior: harnessing behavioral variability, rather than eliminating it, links neural activity to the everyday challenges animals evolved to solve.
A Stable Hippocampal Code in Freely Flying Bats
William A. Liberti III*, Tobias A. Schmid*, Angelo Forli, Madeleine Snyder & Michael M. Yartsev (* Equal contribution)
The spatial tuning of hippocampal neurons in freely flying bats remains stable over days and weeks: apparent instability largely reflects variation in the animals' flight behavior.
A Unifying Mechanism Governing Inter-Brain Neural Relationship During Social Interactions
Wujie Zhang & Michael M. Yartsev
A single feedback mechanism explains both the fast fluctuations in neural activity differences between interacting brains and the slow covariation in the activity they share.
Cortical Representation of Group Social Communication in Bats
Maimon C. Rose*, Boaz Styr*, Tobias A. Schmid, Julie E. Elie & Michael M. Yartsev (* Equal contribution)
Frontal cortical neurons in freely communicating groups of bats distinguish vocalizations of self from others and among individuals, with interbrain correlations shaped by each bat's social preferences.
Nonlocal Spatiotemporal Representation in the Hippocampus of Freely Flying Bats
Nicholas M. Dotson & Michael M. Yartsev
Hippocampal activity in freely flying bats predominantly encodes positions meters away from the animal's current location, extending backward and forward in time with an emphasis on the future.
Daria Genzel & Michael M. Yartsev
A human-free, fully automated flight room enables complex natural behaviors in flying bats, with initial recordings revealing retrosplenial neurons that multiplex position, target choice, reward, and visual cues.
A Modular Approach to Vocal Learning: Disentangling the Diversity of a Complex Behavioral Trait
Morgan Wirthlin, Edward F. Chang, Mirjam Knornschild, Leah A. Krubitzer, Claudio V. Mello, Cory T. Miller, Andreas R. Pfenning, Sonja C. Vernes, Ofer Tchernichovski & Michael M. Yartsev
Vocal learning is not a binary trait but a multi-component phenotype of distinct, interconnected modules, a framework that enables comparative study across a wider diversity of species.
Long-term and persistent vocal plasticity in adult bats
Daria Genzel, Janki Desai, Elana Paras and Michael M. Yartsev
Adult Egyptian fruit bats exposed to broad-band acoustic perturbation modify distinct parameters of their vocalizations, and these changes persist for weeks to months after the noise ceases.
Correlated Neural Activity Across the Brains of Socially Interacting Bats
Wujie Zhang and Michael M. Yartsev
Neural activity in the brains of socially interacting bats is correlated across timescales from seconds to hours, and this inter-brain correlation rises before social interactions begin.
Karthik Soman, Srinivasa Chakravarthy and Michael M. Yartsev
A hierarchical anti-Hebbian network model accounts for the emergence of three-dimensional place, border, and grid cells, and predicts a previously undescribed spatial cell type: plane cells.
Nonoscillatory phase-coding and synchronization in the bat hippocampal formation
Tamir Eliav, Maya Geva-Sagiv, Michael M. Yartsev, Arseny Finkelstein, Alon Rubin, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky
Bat hippocampal neurons lock to nonrhythmic field-potential fluctuations and exhibit phase coding of position, demonstrating that temporal coding and synchrony do not require continuous theta oscillations.
Neuroethology of Bat Navigation
Daria Genzel, Yosef Yovel and Michael M. Yartsev
Bats solve navigational challenges ranging from nightly foraging commutes to continent-scale migration: a review of the behavioral strategies and neural mechanisms enabling flight through three-dimensional environments.
Causal contribution and dynamical encoding in the striatum during evidence accumulation
Michael M. Yartsev*, Timothy D Hanks*, Alice M Yoon, Carlos D Brody
The anterior dorsal striatum satisfies all three criteria for direct involvement in evidence accumulation: causal influence on decisions, graded encoding of accumulated evidence, and contribution throughout the accumulation process.
The Emperor's New Wardrobe: Rebalancing Diversity of Animal Models in Neuroscience Research
Michael Yartsev
Species diversity in neuroscience research is sharply declining even as technologies advance: the limitations of converging on a few model organisms, and how broader species choice rectifies them.
Space Bats: Multi-dimensional spatial representation in the bat
Michael Yartsev
A prize essay on the bat as a model for multidimensional spatial coding: place cells map three-dimensional space in flight through neural mechanisms distinct from those described in rodents.
Representation of three-dimensional space in the hippocampus of flying bats
Michael Yartsev & Nachum Ulanovsky
Wireless recordings from freely flying bats reveal hippocampal place cells with confined three-dimensional firing fields, encoding volumetric space through a uniform, nearly isotropic rate code without theta rhythmicity.
Reply to Models of grid cells and theta oscillations
Michael Yartsev, Menno Witter and Nachum Ulanovsky
A response to Barry and colleagues: even accounting for slow movement and low firing rates, bat grid cells lack theta rhythmicity, upholding the challenge to oscillatory interference models.
Grid cells without theta oscillations in the entorhinal cortex of bats
Michael Yartsev, Menno Witter and Nachum Ulanovsky
Grid cells exist in the bat entorhinal cortex without continuous theta oscillations, arguing against oscillatory interference models of how the brain's spatial map is generated.
The full record of every publication, preprint, and citation lives on Google Scholar →
