The development of spatial capacity in piloting and dead reckoning by infant rats: Use of the huddle as a home base for spatial navigation

Loewen, Irene; Wallace, Douglas G.; Whishaw, Ian Q.

doi:10.1002/dev.20063

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Likewise, rats will learn a delayed alternation T-maze task at P21, but not at P15 (Green and Stanton, 1989), and spontaneous alternation in the T-maze appears around P25 (Kirkby, 1967). Young rats also show an abrupt increase in the tendency to explore the environment away from the “huddle” of their littermates on P20, and furthermore, have the ability to “home” directly back to their littermates after exploration, suggesting that path integration is already in place at this age (Loewen et al, 2005). Interestingly, there is evidence that spatial competence emerges abruptly in individual animals (Kirkby, 1967; Nadel, 1990), mirroring the abrupt emergence of adult like grid cells described here.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex

Wills¹,

Barry²,

Cacucci³

2012

Front. Neural Circuits

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Understanding the development of the neural circuits subserving specific cognitive functions such as navigation remains a central problem in neuroscience. Here, we characterize the development of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, which, by nature of their regularly spaced firing fields, are thought to provide a distance metric to the hippocampal neural representation of space. Grid cells emerge at the time of weaning in the rat, at around 3 weeks of age. We investigated whether grid cells in young rats are functionally equivalent to those observed in the adult as soon as they appear, or if instead they follow a gradual developmental trajectory. We find that, from the very youngest ages at which reproducible grid firing is observed (postnatal day 19): grid cells display adult-like firing fields that tessellate to form a coherent map of the local environment; that this map is universal, maintaining its internal structure across different environments; and that grid cells in young rats, as in adults, also encode a representation of direction and speed. To further investigate the developmental processes leading up to the appearance of grid cells, we present data from individual medial entorhinal cortex cells recorded across more than 1 day, spanning the period before and after the grid firing pattern emerged. We find that increasing spatial stability of firing was correlated with increasing gridness.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex

Wills¹,

Barry²,

Cacucci³

2012

Front. Neural Circuits

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“…Rats appear to occupy an intermediate place on this continuum, in that, early in their development for instance, they rely mainly on olfactory cues for navigation, but through learning to associate olfactory cues with visual cues, as adolescents and adults they come to rely mainly on vision [14,32] (with some limitations, however [33]). Also, to develop a cognitive map, rats have to locomote across the parts of the environment that they will come to represent [34][35][36]. In contrast, human and nonhuman primates can represent an environment by viewing it, without having to locomote over each portion to be represented [37][38][39][40][41].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The reach-to-grasp-food task for rats: A rare case of modularity in animal behavior?

Hermer-Vazquez

Chapin

2007

Behavioural Brain Research

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Humans and nonhuman animals make use of sensory hierarchies in "selecting" strategies for solving many cognitive and behavioral tasks. Often, if a preferred type of sensory information is unavailable or is not useful for solving a given task, the animal can switch to a lower-priority strategy, making use of a different class of sensory information. In the case of rats performing a classic reach-to-graspfood task, however, prior studies indicate that the reaching maneuver may be a fixed action pattern that is guided exclusively by the food's odor plume until the point of contact with the food morsel [1][2][3]. We sought to confirm and extend these findings in several ways. In Experiment 1, using a GO/NO-GO variant of the classic task, we demonstrated that rats used the GO target's odor both to trigger and guide their reaches. In Experiment 2, we showed that rats deprived of (a) vision, (b) object-recognizing rostral whiskers and forearm sinus hairs, or (c) both, displayed no deficits in triggering and guiding their reaches. Finally, in a third experiment in which the GO target's location varied randomly across trials and only olfactory cues were available, we demonstrated that rats could determine the spatial endpoint of their reach without any loss of accuracy. Combined with results from a prior study in which bulbectomized rats never developed a new, successful reaching strategy despite extensive post-operative training [1], these results indicate that rats do not have a sensory hierarchy for solving the reach-to-grasp-food task, but rather, are guided by olfaction alone until their paw contacts the food morsel.

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“…Whishaw and Brooks (Whishaw and Brooks, 1999) suggested that animals explore their environment in order to calibrate their 'working space'. Indeed, in the build-up phase, the animals travelled slowly with frequent stops and retreats, thus allowing thorough exploration and scanning of the perimeter (Kramer and McLaughlin, 2001;Loewen et al, 2005) while gaining the opportunity to gather the information needed for mapping. Moreover, only after the buildup phase did the mole rats start to take global crosscuts through the centre, which may indicate that they had acquired a basic representation of the arena (O' Keefe and Nadel, 1978;Tolman, 1948) that was probably sufficient to allow an estimation of travel distance to the other wall.…”

Section: A Primitive Global Map?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration and navigation in the blind mole rat (Spalax ehrenbergi): global calibration as a primer of spatial representation

Avni

Tzvaigrach

Eilam

2008

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYThe aim of this study was to uncover the process of initial spatial mapping of the environment. For this, blind mole rats (Spalax ehrenbergi), were tested in an unfamiliar square arena, in order to reveal how they construct a spatial representation. The mole rats first displayed a build-up phase, in which they gradually formed a path along the perimeter while travelling slowly, frequently pausing and repeating previously travelled segments of the path. This behaviour was followed by a free-travel phase, in which the mole rats appeared to locomote smoothly along the perimeter and through the centre of the arena while travelling faster with fewer stops or repetitions of path segments. Familiarity with the environment was reflected in local shortcuts at the arena corners and global shortcuts (crosscuts) through the arena centre. We suggest that scanning the perimeter throughout the build-up phase constitute a process of calibration, i.e. forming an initial representation of the size and perhaps the shape of the environment -a sort of basic global map. We further suggest that this calibration is later used for navigation, as indicated by the emergence of global crosscuts in the subsequent phase. Further investigation of the build-up phase, e.g. by manipulating environment size, might provide additional insight into the course of establishment of global environment representation (mapping). Supplementary material available online at

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The development of spatial capacity in piloting and dead reckoning by infant rats: Use of the huddle as a home base for spatial navigation

Cited by 32 publications

References 44 publications

The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex

The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex

The reach-to-grasp-food task for rats: A rare case of modularity in animal behavior?

Exploration and navigation in the blind mole rat (Spalax ehrenbergi): global calibration as a primer of spatial representation

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