Control of rodent and human spatial navigation by room and apparatus cues

Abstract

A growing body of literature indicates that rats prefer to navigate in the direction of a goal in the environment (directional responding) rather than to the precise location of the goal (place navigation). This paper provides a brief review of this literature with an emphasis on recent findings in the Morris water task. Four experiments designed to extend this work to humans in a computerized, virtual Morris water task are also described. Special emphasis is devoted how directional responding and place navigation are influenced by room and apparatus cues, and how these cues control distinct components of navigation to a goal. Experiments 1-2 demonstrate that humans, like rats, perform directional responses when cues from the apparatus are present, while Experiment 3 demonstrates that place navigation predominates when apparatus cues are eliminated. In Experiment 4, an eyetracking system measured gaze location in the virtual environment dynamically as participants navigated from a start point to the goal. Participants primarily looked at room cues during the early segment of each trial, but primarily focused on the apparatus as the trial progressed, suggesting distinct, sequential stimulus functions. Implications for computational modeling of navigation in the Morris water task and related tasks are discussed.

Updating of the spatial reference frame of head direction cells in response to locomotion in the vertical plane

“…The authors suggested that navigation in the water maze involved the use of a "movement vector" in which the distal room cues provide information about directional heading and the apparatus cues provide information about the distance of the goal (as well as the animal) from the pool wall. Similar findings with human subjects when tracking their gaze direction also found that they switched the set of cues they were using when performing a virtual reality water task (Hamilton et al 2009b). Physiological studies with hippocampal place cells have also shown that cells can switch reference frames, even within the same recording session.…”

Evidence of MAOA genotype involvement in spatial ability in males

“…In addition, molecular work also shows higher transcriptional efficiency in carriers with the high-activity MAOA allele [17]. Thus, based on this mixed literature, we sought to compare long and short-allele carriers and expected significant differences between groups on spatial performance parameters on a virtual Morris Water Maze task [14, 21]. …”

Fluoxetine restores spatial learning but not accelerated forgetting in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy

“…There is a close correlation between the mechanisms of human and rodent spatial learning and memory (Kesner and Hopkins, 2006) as assessed using real and virtual Morris water maze tasks (Astur et al, 2002;Sutherland and Hamilton, 2004;Hamilton et al, 2009;Goodrich-Hunsaker et al, 2010). Our clinical studies used a verbalizable cued virtual environment as we have previously shown that selective resection of the non-dominant hippocampal formation results in a failure to learn an allocentric task in a non-verbalizable abstract environment (Barkas et al, 2010).…”