Relative contribution of allothetic and idiothetic navigation to place avoidance on stable and rotating arenas in darkness

In the absence of useful visual or other exteroceptive cues, rats can orient in their environment using idiothetic navigation, the process in which the information generated during self-motion is integrated to yield a homing vector leading the animal back to a point of departure. If perceivable exteroceptive cues in the visited environment are available, their spatial relationship is integrated with idiothetic information and stored in a cognitive map of the environment. Our previous experiments demonstrated that place navigation in rats is severely impaired after devaluation of the intramaze substratal information by shuffling, i.e. by its random displacement relative to the already traversed track. Several interpretative difficulties of the previous study have been eliminated in the present study by the use of an advanced version of the shuffling apparatus. The results show that shuffling-induced impairment of substratal idiothesis depends on the salience of intramaze cues, that on a stable featureless arena, idiothesis can be updated by non-visual allothetic cues, and that shuffling exposing the animal to sudden accelerations and decelerations interferes with idiothetic navigation by the inherent conflict between substratal and inertial idiothesis. It is concluded that pure substratal idiothesis not updated by extramaze and intramaze cues cannot provide reliable navigation over distances longer than 5 m. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.