latency of 55-60·ms, well before the central nervous system had time to evaluate the temporal structure of a whole chirp. When every other sound pulse was presented from opposite directions, the crickets followed the temporal pattern of sound presentation and rapidly steered towards the left and right side. Steering towards individual sound pulses does not agree with the proposal that crickets analyse the quality of sound patterns and then steer towards the better pattern. Rather, these

more »

... nts suggest that fast steering to single sound pulses determines the lateral deviation of the animals and that complex auditory orientation emerges from this simple mechanism of auditory steering.