Visuospatial navigation from the bottom-up: without vestibular integration, distance prediction, or maps

TL;DR

This study shows that visual route-based decision-making alone can enable navigation in animals, challenging the belief that a cognitive map and vestibular input are necessary for spatial navigation.

Contribution

It demonstrates the sufficiency of bottom-up, visual route-based strategies for navigation without relying on vestibular input or cognitive maps.

Findings

Three distinct navigation strategies identified.

Navigation performance explained by neural and behavioral tradeoffs.

Behavioral patterns align with biological observations.

Abstract

Navigation is believed to be controlled by at least two partially dissociable systems in the brain. The cognitive map informs an organism of its location and bearing, updated by integrating vestibular self-motion or predicting distances to landmarks. Route-based navigation, on the other hand, directly evaluate sequential movement decisions from immediate percepts. Here we demonstrate the sufficiency of visual route-based decision-making in a classic open field navigation task often assumed to require a cognitive map. Three distinct strategies emerge to robustly navigate to a hidden goal, each conferring contextual tradeoffs analyzed at both neural and behavioral scales, as well as qualitatively aligning with behavior observed across the biological spectrum. We propose reframing navigation from the bottom-up, through an egocentric episodic perspective without assuming online access to computationally expensive top-down representations, to better explain behavior under energetic or attentional constraints.