Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance
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- dc.contributor.author Santos-Pata, Diogo
- dc.contributor.author Verschure, Paul F. M. J.
- dc.date.accessioned 2021-06-21T08:36:26Z
- dc.date.available 2021-06-21T08:36:26Z
- dc.date.issued 2018
- dc.description.abstract When learning new environments, rats often pause at decision points and look back and forth over their possible trajectories as if they were imagining the future outcome of their actions, a behavior termed “Vicarious trial and error” (VTE). As the animal learns the environmental configuration, rats change from deliberative to habitual behavior, and VTE tends to disappear, suggesting a functional relevance in the early stages of learning. Despite the extensive research on spatial navigation, learning and VTE in the rat model, fewer studies have focused on humans. Here, we tested whether head-scanning behaviors that humans typically exhibit during spatial navigation are as predictive of spatial learning as in the rat. Subjects performed a goal-oriented virtual navigation task in a symmetric environment. Spatial learning was assessed through the analysis of trajectories, timings, and head orientations, under habitual and deliberative spatial navigation conditions. As expected, we found that trajectory length and duration decreased with the trial number, implying that subjects learned the spatial configuration of the environment over trials. Interestingly, IdPhi (a standard metric of VTE) also decreased with the trial number, suggesting that humans benefit from the same head-orientation scanning behavior as rats at spatial decision-points. Moreover, IdPhi captured exclusively at the first decision-point of each trial, was correlated with trial trajectory duration and length. Our findings demonstrate that in VTE is a signature of the stage of spatial learning in humans, and can be used to predict performance in navigation tasks with high accuracy.
- dc.description.sponsorship The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013)/ERC grant agreement no (341196) cDAC.
- dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
- dc.identifier.citation Santos-Pata D, Verschure PFMJ. Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance. Front Behav Neurosci. 2018;12:237. DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00237
- dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00237
- dc.identifier.issn 1662-5153
- dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/47951
- dc.language.iso eng
- dc.publisher Frontiers
- dc.relation.ispartof Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 2018;12:237
- dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/341196
- dc.rights © 2018 Santos-Pata and Verschure. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
- dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
- dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- dc.subject.keyword Navigation
- dc.subject.keyword Spatial decision-making
- dc.subject.keyword Hippocampus
- dc.subject.keyword Deliberation
- dc.subject.keyword Habitual
- dc.title Human vicarious trial and error is predictive of spatial navigation performance
- dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
- dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion