Figure 7. Protocol 3: Experiment 3A - detailed analysis of paths taken in the arena.

(A) The criterion for identifying whether the rats approached the home-base or not before they reached the correct reward sandwell on successive daily trials. An approach was at an angle > 45°, whereas a by-pass was at < 45°. (B) A possible cryptic 'egocentric' strategy with the 'home-base' might be to run to it and then use it as an anchor-point for the start of a path-integration-associated accumulation of information. This view predicts that approaches to the home-base location would increase within each session, and be high on recall trials (red symbols and shading). In fact, the actual data (black-symbols) shows the opposite trend. Some animals visited the home-base location on encoding trial 1, but this declined as the animals learned the allocentric location of that session 's rewarded sandwell. (C) There was no difference in PI score between a subset of animals that approached the home-base first (grey) and those first visiting the correct sandwell (green). (D) The frequency of different combinations of preferential approach to the home-base before visiting the correct rewarded sandwell. The left is more egocentric, while right is more allocentric. The most egocentric category implies the rats would always visit the home-based before digging at the correct sandwell, while the most allocentric category implies they should visit the correct sandwell directly.