The starmaze: A paradigm to characterize strategies during spatial navigation

L. Rondi-Reig1, E. Burguière1, G. Petit1,2, A. Arleo1, K. Igloi1 and M. Zaoui1

1LPPA, CNRS-Collège de France, Paris, France
2NPA-DVSN, CNRS-Université Paris 6, Paris, France

Spatial orientation disorders are a major problem in the aged. Among the different cognitive strategies used for spatial navigation, the most complex ones seem to be primarily deteriorated during ageing. Being able to dissociate the different cognitive strategies might help us in the early detection of age related brain diseases.

In order to study different strategies of navigation, a new task was designed and named ‘starmaze’. This test was first developed in animal and then adapted to human using virtual reality. In both cases, up to three different strategies of navigation can be dissociated.

The starmaze is a central pentagonal ring from which five centrally-symetric alleys radiate. A fixed and invisible goal has to be found. To find this goal, the subject can either use distal cues (allocentric strategy), proximal cues located on the internal part of the walls (guidance strategy), or a sequence of body movements leading to the goal (egocentric strategy).

Two versions of the task were used:

  1. The fixed-departure (multiple possible strategies: allocentric, egocentric and guidance.
  2. The allocentric. In the fixed-departure version, the task had two components: the first component tested learning ability; the second one allowed the characterization of the strategy used in order to learn the task. The allocentric version of the task required the subject learning to reach the goal from different starting points and therefore required a spatial representation of the environment.

Data acquisition was performed by means of a video recording system and/or tracking software. Multiple parameters were measured such as for example the distance travelled during each trial and the number of visited arms. Data processing was automated via a MATLAB batch program developed in our laboratory. The paper will present a comparison of the versions used in the two species.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

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