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Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space

Rodent spatial cognition studies allow links to be made between neural and behavioural phenomena, and much is now known about the encoding and use of horizontal space. However, the real world is three dimensional, providing cognitive challenges that have yet to be explored. Motivated by neural findi...

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Autores principales: Jovalekic, Aleksandar, Hayman, Robin, Becares, Natalia, Reid, Harry, Thomas, George, Wilson, Jonathan, Jeffery, Kate
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3157560/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21419172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2011.02.035
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author Jovalekic, Aleksandar
Hayman, Robin
Becares, Natalia
Reid, Harry
Thomas, George
Wilson, Jonathan
Jeffery, Kate
author_facet Jovalekic, Aleksandar
Hayman, Robin
Becares, Natalia
Reid, Harry
Thomas, George
Wilson, Jonathan
Jeffery, Kate
author_sort Jovalekic, Aleksandar
collection PubMed
description Rodent spatial cognition studies allow links to be made between neural and behavioural phenomena, and much is now known about the encoding and use of horizontal space. However, the real world is three dimensional, providing cognitive challenges that have yet to be explored. Motivated by neural findings suggesting weaker encoding of vertical than horizontal space, we examined whether rats show a similar behavioural anisotropy when distributing their time freely between vertical and horizontal movements. We found that in two- or three-dimensional environments with a vertical dimension, rats showed a prioritization of horizontal over vertical movements in both foraging and detour tasks. In the foraging tasks, the animals executed more horizontal than vertical movements and adopted a “layer strategy” in which food was collected from one horizontal level before moving to the next. In the detour tasks, rats preferred the routes that allowed them to execute the horizontal leg first. We suggest three possible reasons for this behavioural bias. First, as suggested by Grobety and Schenk [5], it allows minimisation of energy expenditure, inasmuch as costly vertical movements are minimised. Second, it may be a manifestation of the temporal discounting of effort, in which animals value delayed effort as less costly than immediate effort. Finally, it may be that at the neural level rats encode the vertical dimension less precisely, and thus prefer to bias their movements in the more accurately encoded horizontal dimension. We suggest that all three factors are related, and all play a part.
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spelling pubmed-31575602011-09-29 Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space Jovalekic, Aleksandar Hayman, Robin Becares, Natalia Reid, Harry Thomas, George Wilson, Jonathan Jeffery, Kate Behav Brain Res Research Report Rodent spatial cognition studies allow links to be made between neural and behavioural phenomena, and much is now known about the encoding and use of horizontal space. However, the real world is three dimensional, providing cognitive challenges that have yet to be explored. Motivated by neural findings suggesting weaker encoding of vertical than horizontal space, we examined whether rats show a similar behavioural anisotropy when distributing their time freely between vertical and horizontal movements. We found that in two- or three-dimensional environments with a vertical dimension, rats showed a prioritization of horizontal over vertical movements in both foraging and detour tasks. In the foraging tasks, the animals executed more horizontal than vertical movements and adopted a “layer strategy” in which food was collected from one horizontal level before moving to the next. In the detour tasks, rats preferred the routes that allowed them to execute the horizontal leg first. We suggest three possible reasons for this behavioural bias. First, as suggested by Grobety and Schenk [5], it allows minimisation of energy expenditure, inasmuch as costly vertical movements are minimised. Second, it may be a manifestation of the temporal discounting of effort, in which animals value delayed effort as less costly than immediate effort. Finally, it may be that at the neural level rats encode the vertical dimension less precisely, and thus prefer to bias their movements in the more accurately encoded horizontal dimension. We suggest that all three factors are related, and all play a part. Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press 2011-09-23 /pmc/articles/PMC3157560/ /pubmed/21419172 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2011.02.035 Text en © 2011 Elsevier B.V. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Open Access under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) license
spellingShingle Research Report
Jovalekic, Aleksandar
Hayman, Robin
Becares, Natalia
Reid, Harry
Thomas, George
Wilson, Jonathan
Jeffery, Kate
Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title_full Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title_fullStr Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title_full_unstemmed Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title_short Horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
title_sort horizontal biases in rats’ use of three-dimensional space
topic Research Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3157560/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21419172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2011.02.035
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