Visual landmarks facilitate rodent spatial navigation in virtual reality environments

Abstract

Because many different sensory modalities contribute to spatial learning in rodents, it has been difficult to determine whether spatial navigation can be guided solely by visual cues. Rodents moving within physical environments with visual cues engage a variety of nonvisual sensory systems that cannot be easily inhibited without lesioning brain areas. Virtual reality offers a unique approach to ask whether visual landmark cues alone are sufficient to improve performance in a spatial task. We found that mice could learn to navigate between two water reward locations along a virtual bidirectional linear track using a spherical treadmill. Mice exposed to a virtual environment with vivid visual cues rendered on a single monitor increased their performance over a 3-d training regimen. Training significantly increased the percentage of time avatars controlled by the mice spent near reward locations in probe trials without water rewards. Neither improvement during training or spatial learning for reward locations occurred with mice operating a virtual environment without vivid landmarks or with mice deprived of all visual feedback. Mice operating the vivid environment developed stereotyped avatar turning behaviors when alternating between reward zones that were positively correlated with their performance on the probe trial. These results suggest that mice are able to learn to navigate to specific locations using only visual cues presented within a virtual environment rendered on a single computer monitor.

How vision and movement combine in the hippocampal place code

“…However, there is no agreement on which is more important and how these signals combine to generate spatially localized place cell firing and its temporal organization with respect to the theta rhythm (24). Recent studies showed that mice could navigate in a virtual environment (VE) and a small sample of place cells has been recorded in mice running on a virtual linear track (25)(26)(27). VE affords the opportunity to isolate the visual environment and internal movement-related information from other sensory information, and to study their contributions to place cell firing.…”

Genetics in Suicide Treatments, Modern Diagnosis Establishments

“…On the other hands, some basic biological, pharmacological and toxicological information changes after antidepressant treatments, such as optogenetic studies [25,26] or genetic engineering mice (GEM) [27] and other new technologies and patents must also be used to assess many opening hypotheses and systematic scientific studies, including this one and finally update antidepressant therapy PG and other clinical diagnostic and therapeutic systems. The techniques of optogenetic and genetic engineering mice (GEM) are new endeavors that can be used to study the functions and dysfunctions of specific genes in living bodies.…”

Mongolian gerbils learn to navigate in complex virtual spaces

“…In spite of the great success of these VR setups, there were only few attempts to train animals to carry out more complex navigational tasks in virtual environments [23,24]. Behavioral paradigms in virtual realities for rodents mostly made use of open fields [13], linear tracks [14,15,17,25] or were limited to providing optical flow [16,22] and spatially unrelated visual stimuli [26]. Moreover, subtle differences in the neuronal space codes have been reported between running in real worlds http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2014.03.007 0166-4328/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.…”