Place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by dissociable cognitive systems in mice

A lost navigator must identify its current location and recover its facing direction to restore its bearings. We tested the idea that these two tasks--place recognition and heading retrieval--might be mediated by distinct cognitive systems in mice. Previous work has shown that numerous species, including young children and rodents, use the geometric shape of local space to regain their sense of direction after disorientation, often ignoring nongeometric cues even when they are informative. Notably, these experiments have almost always been performed in single-chamber environments in which there is no ambiguity about place identity. We examined the navigational behavior of mice in a two-chamber paradigm in which animals had to both recognize the chamber in which they were located (place recognition) and recover their facing direction within that chamber (heading retrieval). In two experiments, we found that mice used nongeometric features for place recognition, but simultaneously failed to use these same features for heading retrieval, instead relying exclusively on spatial geometry. These results suggest the existence of separate systems for place recognition and heading retrieval in mice that are differentially sensitive to geometric and nongeometric cues. We speculate that a similar cognitive architecture may underlie human navigational behavior.