Lesions of the dorsal tegmental nuclei disrupt control of navigation by distal landmarks in cued, directional, and place variants of the Morris water task.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Navigation depends on a network of neural systems that accurately monitor an animal's spatial orientation in an environment. Within this navigation system are head direction (HD) cells which discharge as a function of an animal's directional heading, providing an animal with a neural compass to guide ongoing spatial behavior. Experiments were designed to test this hypothesis by damaging the dorsal tegmental nucleus (DTN), a midbrain structure that plays a critical role in the generation of the rodent HD cell signal, and evaluating landmark based navigation using variants of the Morris water task. In Experiments 1 and 2, shams and DTN-lesioned rats were trained to navigate toward a cued platform in the presence of a constellation of distal landmarks located outside the pool. After reaching a training criteria, rats were tested in three probe trials in which (a) the cued platform was completely removed from the pool, (b) the pool was repositioned and the cued platform remained in the same absolute location with respect to distal landmarks, or (c) the pool was repositioned and the cued platform remained in the same relative location in the pool. In general, DTN-lesioned rats required more training trials to reach performance criterion, were less accurate to navigate to the platform position when it was removed, and navigated directly to the cued platform regardless of its position in the pool, indicating a general absence of control over navigation by distal landmarks. In Experiment 3, DTN and control rats were trained in directional and place navigation variants of the water task where the pool was repositioned for each training trial and a hidden platform was placed either in the same relative location (direction) in the pool or in the same absolute location (place) in the distal room reference frame. DTN-lesioned rats were initially impaired in the direction task, but ultimately performed as well as controls. In the place task, DTN-lesioned rats were severely impaired and displayed little evidence of improvement over the course of training. Together, these results support the conclusion that the DTN is required for accurate landmark navigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".