Where's the mouse? Image: Roian Egnor

To investigate how owls locate their prey, a team led by Masakazu Konishi monitored the responses of 14 barn owls to pairs of sounds.

Recordings of the firing of cells in the brain suggest that the bird's hearing system creates a two-dimensional map based on incoming sounds.

Instead of simply adding up these brain signals like most nerve cells, the owl's auditory system multiplies the signals to give a more accurate indication of the timing and location of the sounds.

The research is reported in the journal Science.

"Examples of multiplication by neurons or neural circuits are scarce, although many computational models use this basic operation," write the authors.