JAPANESE QUAIL UTILIZE NOVEL ROUTES AND SHORTCUTS IN AN ENCLOSED ENVIRONMENT

The hippocampal formation (HF) plays a critical role in facilitating cognitive representations of an environment to support navigation, memory, and decision-making across species. The fundamental component of the cognitive map in rodents is the place cell. These cells are largely absent from Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica), with cells in the quail HF instead encoding head direction. Thus, quail are a prime model for spatial cognition in the absence of robust place cell coding. One particularly important aspect of navigation thought to require place cells is the ability to generate novel shortcuts. We tested this notion by examining quails’ ability to compute novel routes and shortcuts in an environment in which they were allowed restricted access. After extensive training in the internal alleys of a plus-shaped maze with external pathways connecting adjacent endpoints, quail were given a series of four tests: Two Novel Alleys tests where they needed to use a new, external path to get to a pre-determined endpoint, an Internal Alleys test where all inner alleys were accessible, and an All Alleys test where every alley was open. Preliminary data show that quail perform well above chance in all conditions, suggesting that quail possess the capacity to take novel routes and shortcuts to reach a target location despite their lack of robust place cells. Further research with this model organism may expand our understanding of the navigational strategies possible to create more flexible mental representations of space.