Route and landmark learning by rats searching for food

Many foraging animals rely on visual landmarks and/or habitual paths to locate important resources. We examined the degree to which rats rely on these cues when they predicted conflicting food locations. In this foraging task, rats were required to find food which could be located using either a fixed route or a nearby visual landmark. In tests, we found that their subsequent search-based estimates of the food location were the same when animals had acquired a long-term memory of the route, the landmark, or both. We show that the degree to which animals rely on the cues depends not only on the discrepancy between the two cues, but also on whether animals can match the testing "view" with a learned "view" that has been acquired during training.