Abstract
Animals can use a repertoire of strategies to navigate in an environment, and it remains an intriguing question how these strategies are selected based on the nature and familiarity of environments. To investigate this question, we developed a fully automated variant of the Barnes maze, characterized by 24 vestibules distributed along the periphery of a circular arena, and monitored the trajectories of mice over 15 days as they learned to navigate from a random start vestibule to a goal vestibule. We show that the patterns of vestibule visits can be reproduced by the combination of three stochastic processes reminiscent of random, serial and spatial strategies. The processes randomly selected vestibules based on either uniform (random) or biased (serial and spatial) probability distributions; closely matched experimental data across a range of statistical distributions characterizing the length, distribution, step size, direction, and stereotypy of vestibule sequences; and revealed a shift from random to spatial and serial strategies over time, with a strategy switch occurring approximately every 6 vestibule visits. Our study provides a novel apparatus and analysis toolset for tracking the repertoire of navigation strategies and demonstrates that a set of stochastic processes can largely account for exploration patterns in the Barnes maze.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
_ Introduction of a new model, based on a Markov chain, capturing within-trial evolution in search strategy. _ Addition of a new figure investigating inter-animal variations in search strategy. _ Measurement of model fit consistency across 10 simulation repetitions, to prevent the risk of model overfitting. _ Several clarifications have been made in the main text (Results, Discussion, Methods) and figure legends. _ Simplification of the previous modeling. We realized that the two first models in the previous manuscript version were simply special cases of the third model. Therefore, we retained only the third model, which has been renamed as the mixture model. _ Modification of Figure 4-6 and Supplementary Figure 7-8 (or their creation) to reflect the aforementioned changes
