Spatial Representation and Navigation Flashcards
what does distal cues mean
long range, far away
what does proximal cues mean
short range
what is an egocentric frame of reference
relative to the individual
what is an allocentric frame of reference
relative to the environment
example of rats learning complex mazes
Hampton Court replica (Small, 1900)
What did Tolman 1946 show
- Tolman et al’s (1946) “sunburst” maze seemed to show that rats have a sense of direction and can take a shortcut
- Rat learnt where the goal was in relation to start
What is the simple t-maze
- T maze, start in the down arm and can go either left or right
- Rat goes left to get food, but how?
Possibilities: • Smell • Glands on stomach touch floor and could sense • Pavlovian conditioned approach • Instrumental response • Map Turns out, all of these are right
how to test whether rats follow food smell
Swap the arms of the T-maze- If it’s following an odour trail it will go to the “wrong” side.
If we know it’s not the odour of the food, then the trick is to rotate the entire maze 180 degrees to differentiate between a response based on place and one based on instrumental learning. This approach can also rule out the “odour trail” explanation if they show control by place. If open to the environment, they will go to the place in space (top of the upside down T)
what is the rotation test in the radial arm maze
The animals are forced to the 4 arms shown in blue, then the maze is rotated through 45º (or the landmarks are rotated relative to the maze.
Now the rats are offered a choice between an unvisited arm U (animal has not been down it, there is food at the end, but it’s now at the location that was visited) or a visited arm V (animal has just been down it, no food at end, but is at an unvisited location.)
The result is that rats tend to choose the visited arm. In my studies a typical result was that on 32 trials 20 were revisits to previously visited arms. A control test where the maze was not rotated gave only 2 visits to previously visited arms, a highly reliable difference. Prefers to visit the place that has not been visited rather than the arm that hasn’t.
in the rotation test, which arms do rats prefer
Prefers to visit the place that has not been visited rather than the arm that hasn’t.
The result is that rats tend to choose the visited arm
what did Suzuki et al 1980 find
Suzuki, Augerinos and Black (1980) used a cylindrical testing chamber with discrete landmarks at each arm of the radial maze. They found that rats ‘followed” rotation of the landmarks with respect to the maze, but a re-arrangement of the landmarks relative to one another (i.e. transposition) dramatically worsened performance between study and test.
Rats use the landmarks array to control their behavior. If you can arrange the landmarks (e.g. swapping), this disturbs the behavior of the rats. They are using the confieration of landmarks to do their search.
These data suggest that rats use configurations of landmarks to define locations in the radial maze, rather than using them as beacons to mark specific locations close by.
What did O’Keefe and Nadel 1978 find
O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) in their book “The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map” went further and claimed that animals use a map to navigate, and that the mechanisms for constructing and using this map were located in the hippocampus
who experimented The hippocampus as a cognitive map
O’Keefe and Nadel 1978
what did O’Keefe and Nadel 1978 find about hippocampus
• O’Keefe and Nadel: single cell recording in the hippocampus shows “place cells” which fire when a rat is in a particular place in a maze
what is the morris water maze
The apparatus looks like this (plan view). It’s raised off the floor and open so that the animal can see around the room
