Chapter 21 - Spatial Behaviour Flashcards
Topographic memory?
- A memory for the organization of the world (used to spatially navigate properly)
Cognitive maps?
- A neural representation of a cognitive process such as spatial localization
Grasping space vs. Distal space?
- Grasping space - space that immediately surrounds the body
- Distal space - space through which the body travels
Time space?
- Encompasses autonoetic awareness
What are the different types of spatial behaviours used by animals?
1) Route following - moving toward/away from a cue
2) Piloting - topographic guidance, involves cognitive guidance
3) Caching - rely on distal spatial cues (no local landmarks), humans don’t really do this
4) Dead reckoning - cues generated by animal’s movement used to calculate distance/direction from starting point
Morris swimming tasks?
- Developed by Richard Morris
- rats must navigate to find platform
- There are different variations to test specific types of spatial memory
What are the different variations of Morris’s swimming task?
A) Place-learning task - rat in pool must find hidden platforms, must take into account visual cues in room. A form of piloting
B) Matching-to-place task - hidden platform in new location each day, but will remain there for the rest of the trials
C) Landmark-learning task - rat must follow cue on side of pool wall. The wall cue is moved each trial. A form of route following
Can you infer an animal’s degree of spatial memory based solely on their hippocampal volume?
- Yes
- Greater hpc volume = greater spatial memory
When is dead reckoning used by rats?
- When animal is travelling in the dark
- In novel environments (cues are unfamiliar)
- In a location where visual cues change frequently
*Can be impacted by lesions to hpc and fimbria fornix
Which brain regions are engaged in mental rotation?
- Superior parietal lobule and the intraparietal sulcus
What’s topographic disorientation?
- Disability in finding one’s way in relation to salient environmental cues; likely due to topographic agnosia or amnesia
- Can’t form new cognitive maps
- 4 main types
Egocentric disorientation?
- Difficulty in perceiving the relative location of objects with respect to self
- Usually caused by unilateral or bilateral lesions to posterior parietal cortex
- Can get lost in their own homes
- Poor mental rotation and distance judgement, optic ataxia
What’s heading disorientation (allocentric disorientation)?
- Inability to set course to a pre-set destination, but can recognize landmarks
- Can recognize their own location in relationship to landmarks and describe where they want to go.
- Associated with damage to right posterior cingulate cortex
What’s landmark agnosia?
- Inability to recognize salient environmental landmarks to navigate
- Relatively typical object recognition for broad categories of info but impaired at recognizing specific instances
- Usually damage to right (or bilateral) medial occipital lobe, often affecting libgual and fusiform gyri, and sometimes the parahippocampal gyrus
Anterograde disorientation?
- Difficulty in navigating in novel environments
- Visual learning impaired
- Visually-guided reaching usually spared
- Caused by damage to right parahippocampal gyrus (can’t create new cognitive maps)
- Like a spatial amnesia
What’s the Ray-Osterrieth complex figure task used for assessing?
- Can provide patient with a complex figure to copy and this can help determine visuospatial memory (and other things)
What cells are used to help position the brain in space?
1) Place cells
2) Head-direction cells
3) Grid cells
What are place cells?
- Hippocampal cells that fire preferentially when animal enters a specific location in its environment
- They’re also, by extension, found in the subiculum and the entorhinal cortex
- hey can combine to form place fields
What are head direction cells?
- Increased firing rate when an animal points its head in a specific direction
- Found in much of the rat limbic system
- Location doesn’t really matter
What are grid cells?
- Neurons of the entorhinal cortex fire when an animal passes certain locations. Together, these locations form a grid
- Forms a coordinate system, almost like they represent longitude and latitude
How do the three positioning cells interact and contribute to spatial behaviour?
- Place cells - contribute to navigation based on external cues (allocentric guidance)
- Head direction cells - role in navigation in relationship to the animal’s own location (egocentric guidance)
- Grid cells - indicated size of a space and the animal’s location within that space
What do the end spots of place, head-direction, and grid cells all indicate?
- All their info ends at the hpc
- Indicates that the hpc is the location of our spatial maps
Which area of the hpc is enlarged in London taxi drivers?
- The right posterior enlarged over time
- Increases in size and function as years spent as a taxi driver
