Blankenship Philip A, Cherep Lucia A, Donaldson Tia N, Brockman Sarah N, Trainer Alexandria D, Yoder Ryan M, Wallace Douglas G
Dept of Psychology, NIU, DeKalb, IL, 60115, United States.
Dept of Psychology, IPFW, Fort Wayne, IN, 46805, United States.
Behav Brain Res. 2017 May 15;325(Pt A):1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2017.02.031. Epub 2017 Feb 21.
The organization of rodent exploratory behavior appears to depend on self-movement cue processing. As of yet, however, no studies have directly examined the vestibular system's contribution to the organization of exploratory movement. The current study sequentially segmented open field behavior into progressions and stops in order to characterize differences in movement organization between control and otoconia-deficient tilted mice under conditions with and without access to visual cues. Under completely dark conditions, tilted mice exhibited similar distance traveled and stop times overall, but had significantly more circuitous progressions, larger changes in heading between progressions, and less stable clustering of home bases, relative to control mice. In light conditions, control and tilted mice were similar on all measures except for the change in heading between progressions. This pattern of results is consistent with otoconia-deficient tilted mice using visual cues to compensate for impaired self-movement cue processing. This work provides the first empirical evidence that signals from the otolithic organs mediate the organization of exploratory behavior, based on a novel assessment of spatial orientation.
啮齿动物探索行为的组织似乎依赖于自我运动线索处理。然而，截至目前，尚无研究直接考察前庭系统对探索性运动组织的贡献。当前研究将旷场行为依次划分为行进和停顿，以表征在有视觉线索和无视觉线索条件下，对照小鼠和耳石缺失倾斜小鼠在运动组织上的差异。在完全黑暗的条件下，倾斜小鼠总体上表现出相似的行进距离和停顿时间，但相对于对照小鼠，它们有更多迂回的行进、行进间更大的航向变化以及不太稳定的巢穴聚集。在有光条件下，对照小鼠和倾斜小鼠在所有指标上都相似，除了行进间的航向变化。这种结果模式与耳石缺失倾斜小鼠利用视觉线索来补偿受损的自我运动线索处理一致。这项工作基于对空间定向的新评估，提供了首个实证证据，表明来自耳石器官的信号介导了探索行为的组织。
