Effects of Fragmentation of Visual Navigational Signals on the Orientation of Rats in a Radial Maze

Experiments on rats were carried out to study the effects of fragmentation of visual navigation signals on search behavior in a radial maze with asymmetrical food reinforcement. The dopaminergic system of the brain was found to have an important role in impairments to the animals’ invariant perception of significant sensory objects on removal of one of two adjacent extramaze navigation cues and in determining the location of the largest reinforcement in the maze. The basis of these impairments was found to be deficit of associative memory between the remaining and the remote cues. Possible animal modeling of impairments to sensory perception in neurological diseases due to dysfunction of the dopaminergic system of the brain is assessed. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.