Rats are able to navigate in virtual environments

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) systems are useful tools that enable users to alter environmental settings and the location of landmarks in an accurate and fast way. Primates have been shown to be able to navigate in virtual environments. For rodents, however, all previous attempts to develop VR systems in which rats behave in the same way as in corresponding 3-D environments have failed. The question arises as to whether, in principle, rodents can be trained to navigate in a properly designed virtual environment (VE), or whether this peculiarity is limited to primates and humans. We built a virtual reality set-up that takes the wide-angle visual system of rats into account. We show for the first time that rats learn spatial tasks in this VE quite readily. This set-up opens up new opportunities for investigations of information processing in navigation (e.g. the importance of optic flow or vestibular input).