Part 1: questions for today:
1. How do animals manage to find their way around?
2. That is, how do they navigate?
Some ways we can ask this question:
• Learning - for example to distinguish one place from another – in online lecture
• Memory – ability to learn about spatial cues and use the information later
• More ecologically valid experiments looking at behaviour outside the lab
Part 1 approach:
• Focus on spatial navigation because
– much evidence that spatial location is highly salient for many species
– important in early development of ideas about animal cognition (Tolman’s
“cognitive map”)
– many recent investigations
● Focus on memory because
– recent evidence of exceptional ability in spatial memory
– Intriguing neuropsychological data
Terminology
• Distal (long range) vs proximal (short range) cues
• Egocentric (relative to the individual) vs allocentric (relative to the environment) frames
of reference
, • Beacons (Pavlovian approach) vs landmarks (used as a reference)
Spatial Learning in the laboratory rat
Tolman
Rationale: If there is any way of solving a learning task by treating it as a spatial problem, that’s
what a rat will do (“position effects”)
• Rats can learn complex mazes, e.g. Hampton Court replica (Small, 1900)
• Tolman et al’s (1946) “sunburst” maze seemed to show that rats have a sense of
direction and can take a shortcut, though only if there’s a “beacon” available
What Tolman did nicely illustrates the pitfalls that can bedevill this type of experiment.
Procedure:
He trained rats to run the first maze shown on the left.
Once they were running quickly to the goal, he then gave them a test with the maze on the
right. It uses the same start position and the same goal location, but they can’t follow the usual
path (it’s been sealed off) and instead must pick one of the radiating arms (you can see why it’s
called a “sunburst” maze).
Results:
The rats were able to choose the arm that led to the goal with a higher success rate than
chance would allow.
So they know the location of the goal?
- Well, unfortunately Tolman had positioned a light (shown on the righthand diagram)
near the goal throughout training, and it was still there on test. So they could have just
learned to approach the light (beacon) and not be using anything like a “map” of the
surroundings.
Nevertheless, the “cognitive map” idea started by Tolman has proven very influential,
particularly in the work of Nadel and O’Keefe. They wrote a book called “The Hippocampus as a
Cognitive Map” based on their single unit recording work. They were able to show that cells in
the hippocampus in the rat seemed to fire only when the rat was in a specific location (“place
cells”).
The hippocampus as a cognitive map
O’Keefe and Nadel
2
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