Orientation in the white rat

Carr, Harvey A.; Watson, John B.

doi:10.1002/cne.920180103

Cited by 106 publications

(47 citation statements)

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“…In Experiment 2, the performance of the same rats was disturbed by the displacement and rotation of the test box within the room. Carr and Watson (1908;see also Carr, 1917) were among the first to report the dramatic effect of changing the orientation of a maze with respectto the extramazeenvironment,even under conditions where the extramazeenvironmentwas not perceptible to the rat once it was in the maze. Their results showedthat the rat carries with it into an enclosedmaze a sense of its global heading, its orientation with respect to the environment outside the maze.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heading in the rat: Determination by environmental shape

Margules

Gallistel

1988

Animal Learning & Behavior

214

124

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After a 75-sec intratrial delay, rats that had been shown the location of hidden food within a rectangular box correctly dug at that location in a second identical box, which had been moved into the same position within the room. For some rats, the opposing ends of the boxes were differentiated by distinctive comer panels; for others, there were no panels. When, during the delay interval, the turntable supporting both boxes was rotated by more than 180 0 , 80 that the second box no longer took the place of the first box within the room, the rats showed performance decrements. Nevertheless, 4 subjects selected the correct location significantly more often than the rotationally equivalent location, which corresponds to the correct location when the ends of the box are confused. The amount of rotation had no significant effect for any rat. In a final phase, the rats were denied perceptual access to cues outside the test box, which now had differentiating comer panels for all rats. Despite the distinctive panels, no rat showed a significant difference between correct digs and rotational errors; that is, no rat reliably distinguished one end ofthe box from the other. Results confirm previous findings that rats rely primarily on environmental shape to establish their heading. They ignore distinctive features of the surfaces that define environmental shape, even when the shape by itself is insufficient to establish a unique orientation.Recent experiments have strengthened the longstanding hypothesis that diverse animals form cognitive maps, behaviorally useful records of the geometric relationships among points in the environment (Gould, 1986;Tolman, 1948). Animals commonly orient toward points that are specified not by their intrinsic sensory/perceptual characteristics but rather by their remembered location within the spatial framework defined by surrounding objects (Tinbergen & Kruyt, 1938;Tinklepaugh, 1932; see Gallistel, 1989, for review of recent literature). This form of animal orientation is sometimes called piloting, by analogy to the orienting of mariners with respect to a hidden shoal on the basis of the shoal's remembered (charted) location relative to observable shore points. The experiments of Morris (1981) with rats in a water maze make this analogy particularly apt: The rats were to find a brick just beneath the surface of opacified water. The hidden brick itself had no distinctive features; thus, it had to be found by virtue of its position within the known space (the swimming pool and the experimental room).Establishing one's position and orientation (heading) within the framework established by the known (mapped) aspects of the environment is fundamental to piloting. There is extensive experimental evidence that extramaze, or "room," cues are important determinants of the rat's orientation within a maze (Carr, 1917; Hebb, 1938;Olton & Samuelson, 1976;Ritchie, 1947;Suzuki, Augerinos, & Black, 1980), but what constitutes the behaviorally imRequests for reprints may be addressed to C. R. Gallistel, Depa...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heading in the rat: Determination by environmental shape

Margules

Gallistel

1988

Animal Learning & Behavior

214

124

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“…That rodents have been observed to run at full speed into a barrier when it is placed across a familiar route (Carr and Watson, 1908) also suggests that they are not constantly attending to visual input. But at longer time scales drift in the path integrator will need to be corrected by perceptual feedback, perhaps when the animal has paused in its motion or is rearing and looking about.…”

Section: Normal Navigationmentioning

confidence: 96%

Theory of rodent navigation based on interacting representations of space

1996

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“…R. Soc. B 369: 20130482 the sequence up to the end even if the reward is delivered within the sequence, and the performance of the rest of the sequence is not required [30] (see also [31] for a similar phenomenon in maze navigation). It is worth mentioning that, although action selection is divorced from environmental feedback under these conditions, this does not imply that the execution of actions is feedback-free; action execution can operate in a closed-loop manner by relying on sensory feedback and environmental stimuli.…”

Section: (B) Slips Of Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habits as action sequences: hierarchical action control and changes in outcome value

Dezfouli

Lingawi

Balleine

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

130

118

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One contribution of 18 to a Theme Issue 'The principles of goal-directed decisionmaking: from neural mechanisms to computation and robotics'. Goal-directed action involves making high-level choices that are implemented using previously acquired action sequences to attain desired goals. Such a hierarchical schema is necessary for goal-directed actions to be scalable to real-life situations, but results in decision-making that is less flexible than when action sequences are unfolded and the decision-maker deliberates step-by-step over the outcome of each individual action. In particular, from this perspective, the offline revaluation of any outcomes that fall within action sequence boundaries will be invisible to the high-level planner resulting in decisions that are insensitive to such changes. Here, within the context of a two-stage decisionmaking task, we demonstrate that this property can explain the emergence of habits. Next, we show how this hierarchical account explains the insensitivity of over-trained actions to changes in outcome value. Finally, we provide new data that show that, under extended extinction conditions, habitual behaviour can revert to goal-directed control, presumably as a consequence of decomposing action sequences into single actions. This hierarchical view suggests that the development of action sequences and the insensitivity of actions to changes in outcome value are essentially two sides of the same coin, explaining why these two aspects of automatic behaviour involve a shared neural structure.

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Orientation in the white rat

Cited by 106 publications

References 0 publications

Heading in the rat: Determination by environmental shape

Heading in the rat: Determination by environmental shape

Theory of rodent navigation based on interacting representations of space

Habits as action sequences: hierarchical action control and changes in outcome value

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