Topic: allocentric navigation

A major challenge in studying spatial memory is understanding whether and how different navigational strategies influence hippocampal spatial representations of the environment.We designed a spatial recency memory task with two variants: one requiring allocentric representations of location, the other entailing egocentric representations. 10 freely-moving rats were trained over 34 daily sessions; each day, rats learned and then recalled the position of a food reward among six locations. Each trial, animals entered the arena from one of four start locations, generating distinct origin-goal traj

Cognitive flexibility is the capability to appropriately adapt one's behavior in response to new and unexpected conditions in the environment (Prado et al., Neuroscience, 2017). This cognitive function plays a fundamental role in our ability to adapt and learn. When cognitive flexibility encompasses spatial information, it is supported by a hippocampo-cortico-thalamic network in which the reuniens and rhomboid nuclei (ReRh) of the thalamus may relay information between hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We showed that reversible inactivation (muscimol or DREADD for ReRh) of o