Place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by dissociable cognitive systems in mice.

ABSTRACT: A lost navigator must identify its current location and recover its facing direction to restore its bearings. We tested the idea that these two tasks--place recognition and heading retrieval--might be mediated by distinct cognitive systems in mice. Previous work has shown that numerous species, including young children and rodents, use the geometric shape of local space to regain their sense of direction after disorientation, often ignoring nongeometric cues even when they are informative. Notably, these experiments have almost always been performed in single-chamber environments in which there is no ambiguity about place identity. We examined the navigational behavior of mice in a two-chamber paradigm in which animals had to both recognize the chamber in which they were located (place rec

SUBMITTER: Julian JB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4443371 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature