Egocentrically-stable discriminative stimulus-based spatial navigation in mice: implementation and comparison with allocentric cues

Animals are capable of using visual cues to find the correct route during navigation. These visual cues, which contain spatial information on the direction towards the goal point, are perceived either allocentrically or egocentrically. In this study, we examined how navigating with these two types of visual cues affects the learning processes of rodents. To present egocentrically-stable spatial cues, we devised a head-mounted device that provided discriminative orientation cues that indicated the correct choice at a fork within a double Y-maze. For allocentrically-stable spatial cues, LEDs serving as external route-mark cues were attached to the walls of the double Y-maze and illuminated to indicate the correct pathway. To rule out the possibility of the mice using extra-maze cues, we rotated the entire maze and used different start and goal sites for every trial. Our results revealed that mice using egocentric cues and external route-mark cues both showed a sigmoidal learning process for spatial navigation and that external route mark-based learning, surprisingly, learned faster than egocentric stimulus-based learning in egocentric space.