Topic: shelter-directed escapes

Navigating towards goals in crowded spaces is a complex behavior that requires keeping track of relative positions of goals and obstacles. Animals can solve this by breaking down routes into subgoals - intermediate waypoints. It is not known how the brain represents subgoals, or how their representation differs from static spatial features of the environment. Building on work showing that mice use a subgoal strategy to escape to shelter, we placed mice in an arena divided in half by a barrier, with a shelter in the bottom half. The barrier leaves a gap on one side which mice learn to use as a