Department of Psychology, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland.
Learn Mem. 2013 Jun 17;20(7):367-78. doi: 10.1101/lm.029272.112.
Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional information. We show how animals use the cues in a visually dependent guidance manner to find the goal. Further, we demonstrate how hippocampal lesions disrupt this learning mechanism. Our results can be explained through the vector model of navigation built on associative learning principles rather than evoking a cognitive map.
学习朝着目标前进是一项基本技能。位置学习被认为依赖于动物将目标位置与周围环境线索相关联的能力。使用 Morris 水迷宫，这是一种常用于研究位置学习的任务，我们证明了远距离线索为动物提供了距离和方向信息。我们展示了动物如何以视觉依赖的引导方式使用这些线索来找到目标。此外，我们还展示了海马体损伤如何破坏这种学习机制。我们的结果可以通过基于联想学习原理构建的导航向量模型来解释，而不是唤起认知图。
