Our recent paper where we show the appearence of a cognitive map in mice from self-motion signals received a highlight from eLife.

Mice can generate a cognitive map of an environment based on self-motion signals when there is a fixed association between their starting point and the location of their goal.

When moving through an environment, we often use visual landmarks – such as a specific store or street sign – to guide us and determine our next action (Tolman et al., 1946a). However, the brain does not just rely on visual landmarks for navigation. It also performs path integration, a process that uses self-motion signals – such as velocity and acceleration – to estimate our position in an environment relative to where we started (Mittelstaedt and Mittelstaedt, 1980; Wittlinger et al., 2006; Savelli and Knierim, 2019; Etienne and Jeffery, 2004). This ability is why you can walk through a dark room and still maintain a sense of your location.

In mammals, path integration can also update an internal estimate of position on a ‘cognitive map’, a neural representation of a known environment containing information on the distances, directions and spatial relationships between locations. However, how cognitive maps initially form, and the amount and type of information that is required to build them, is not fully understood. Now, in eLife, Leonard Maler and colleagues from the University of Ottawa – including Jiayun Xu and Mauricio Girardi-Schappo as joint first authors – report that mice can create cognitive maps by relying predominantly on path integration (Xu et al., 2024).

Continue reading the insight in eLife…

eLife Assessment

This fundamental work provides creative and thoughtful analysis of rodent foraging behavior and its dependence on body reference frame-based vs world reference frame-based cues. Compelling evidence demonstrates that a robust map, capable of supporting taking novel shortcuts, can be learned primarily if not exclusively based on self-motion cues, which has rarely if ever been reported outside of the human literature. The work, which will be of interest to a broad audience of neuroscientists, provides a rich discussion about the role of the hippocampus in supporting the behavior that should guide future neurophysiological investigations.

• Jiayun Xu, Mauricio Girardi-Schappo, Jean-Claude Beique, André Longtin Leonard Maler (2024) Shortcutting from self-motion signals reveals a cognitive map in mice. eLife 13:RP95764.