Route instruction based spatial navigation in rodent model

Abstract

Drivers can use a 'navigator' to help them decide which direction to go when they meet a fork. This kind of navigation does not demand spatial cues or memory of environments. It does not use local land-mark, but depends on how the subject match their decision to the externally-guided route instruction. In this paper, we propose the route navigation system and demonstrate that mice are able to utilize this form of spa-tial navigation. When mice meet a fork in a triple Y-maze, the head-attached instructing device provides a binary directional information, left or right. Because the goal is changed in every trial, we count the rate of correctness by whether the mouse’s decision at each fork matches with the externally-guided route instruction or not. As the number of trials increases, the percentage of correctness is significantly increased more than that of random probability. In addition, this type of navigation has different learning process from ones that use local landmark. These results reveal that rodents are able to be navigated through externally-guided route instructions based on our proposed navigation system.