Can humans and animals really use internal maps to navigate and take shortcuts?
Tolman famously argued "yes" - based largely on his Sunburst maze experiment.
However, our new review & meta-analysis suggests the evidence is far weaker than you might think.
馃У馃憞 https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.70365
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#neuroESC #navigation #neuroscience #neuroethology #SpatialCognition #AnimalBehaviour #shortcutting #cognitivemap #tolman
It is always important to separate "can" from "do". The fact that animals *can* take the shortcut doesn't mean they often *do*. Because planning takes cognitive effort, you have to make it worth the while, and even then, animals (including humans!) can be surprisingly unmotivated to do cognitive work. (Ask any teacher.)
The balance between automated habit and cognitive planning depends on a complex interaction between individual characteristics (strain, species, sex, etc), environment (number of cues available - more cues actually leads to more planning, even though there are more cues to orient to), and training (more training leads to more automation).
A better study to compare these two are all the plus-maze experiments that put planning and habit into direct conflict. (I think there are more plus maze studies out there. Because it is an easier task to do, it has enabled better breakdown of the what drives animals to use one system or the other.)
* and don't forget that some behaviors can be instinctual (like vacuum up food on the floor or a bird pecking at a key).
If memory serves, the first experiment to do the "right controls" to prove animals can use a cognitive map was the hidden platform water task, conventionally called the "Morris Water Maze" (Morris et al 1981), which was explicitly designed to test O'Keefe and Nadel's 1978 theory.
Even in the MWM, which system is used depends on strain, environment, and available cues, and one can only know which system is being used through carefully constructed probe trials. (See Redish 1999 for review.)
@adredish
Yes!
We discuss some of this in the paper and I hope you'll have time to read it and let us know what you think!!
It's a very nice paper. A thorough review of the experiment. I wish more papers did that thorough literature review. People need to be doing more of this.
It's interesting, but I never took the sunburst maze as the Tolmanian breakthrough. I always thought it was latent learning that was the thing that convinced everyone.
Well, actually, no one was convinced. My understanding is that Tolman's theories were abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s as Skinnerian behaviorism took over. That was the big breakthrough of the O'Keefe and Nadel theory was that they were "re-promoting" Tolman's cogntive map.
