Bats decouple sonar gaze from steering to resolve sensory conflict

When sensory modalities yield conflicting information, animals must rapidly reassess stimuli to select their actions. We induced auditory-visual conflict in free-flying echolocating Egyptian fruit bats by fitting animals with prisms that shifted the perceived visual location of a landing perch while echoes returned from its veridical location. Bats that course-corrected within a single goal-directed flight did so by decoupling sonar gaze from steering, to enable rapid reweighting of visual and auditory cues. We designed artificial agents that used Bayesian inference to construct estimates of goal locations in their environment. When competing estimates directed active-sensing behaviors distinctly from steering, agents course-corrected more rapidly. Consistent with this idea, when bats were fit with prisms and earplugs that attenuated auditory localization cues, they were unable to course correct. Removing prisms produced no systematic after-effects. Our framework suggests that instead of correcting their behavior after failure, animals could efficiently employ active sensing to resolve sensory conflict before failure occurs.