Data from: Estimation of self-motion duration and distance in rodents

Spatial orientation and navigation rely on information about landmarks and self-motion cues gained from multi-sensory sources. In this study, we focused on self-motion and examined the capability of rodents to extract and make use of information about own movement, i.e. path integration. Path integration has been investigated in depth in insects and humans. Demonstrations in rodents, however, mostly stem from experiments on heading direction; less is known about distance estimation. We introduce a novel behavioural paradigm that allows for probing temporal and spatial contributions to path integration. The paradigm is a bisection task comprising movement in a virtual reality environment in combination with either timing the duration ran or estimating the distance covered. We performed experiments with Mongolian gerbils and could show that the animals can keep track of time and distance during spatial navigation.空间定向与导航依赖于从多感官渠道获取的地标信息与自身运动线索。本研究聚焦于自身运动维度，探究啮齿类动物提取并利用自身运动信息的能力，即路径积分（path integration）。路径积分已在昆虫与人类中得到深入研究，但针对啮齿类动物的相关验证大多来自头部方向相关实验，目前学界对其距离估计能力的了解仍较为有限。我们提出了一种全新的行为范式，可用于探究路径积分中的时间与空间贡献因子。该范式为一项二分任务，实验动物需在虚拟现实（virtual reality）环境中完成运动，并同时对运动时长或移动距离进行估计。我们以蒙古沙鼠为实验对象开展了相关实验，结果证实这些动物在空间导航过程中能够追踪时间与距离信息。