Animals use spatial or visual cues in order to find the correct route during navigation. Although some social animals understand human pointing, it remains unclear whether rodents can use externally given instructions for spatial navigation. Similar to human automotive navigation systems, we devised a head- mounted device that provides a discriminative orientation cues indicating a “left” or “right” route at the branch point of a double Y-maze. We assessed if mice can learn to find the correct route using the stimuli. To rule out the possibility of mice using spatial or visual cues, we rotated the entire maze and used different start and goal sites for every trial. After 30 days of training period, 70% of the mice fully learned to use the left/right instruction in order to reach the rewarded goal, whereas 30% adopted instruction cue-independent strategies. These results suggest that rodents have the capacity for decision making based on instructive cues.
This work was collaborated with Prof. Daesoo Kim’s lab.
Related publications
1. Egocentrically-stable discriminative stimulus-based spatial navigation in mice: implementation and comparison with allocentric cues, Scientific Reports, 9, 2019 [LINK] [PDF] [SUPPLEMENT]
