Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

While navigating the world, we pick up on patterns of where things tend to appear. According to theories of memory and studies of animal behavior, knowledge of these patterns emerges gradually over days or weeks via consolidation of individual navigation episodes. Here, we discovered that navigation patterns can also be extracted on-line, prior to the opportunity for off-line consolidation, as a result of rapid statistical learning. Thirty human participants navigated a virtual water maze in which platform locations were drawn from a spatial distribution. Within a single session, participants increasingly navigated through the mean of the distribution. This behavior was better simulated by random walks from a model that had only an explicit representation of the current mean, compared with a model that had only memory for the individual platform locations. These results suggest that participants rapidly summarized the underlying spatial distribution and used this statistical knowledge to guide future navigation.

Keywords

memory integration statistical learning episodic encoding consolidation complementary learning systems open data

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abbott

Austerweil

Griffiths

(2015). Random walks on semantic networks can resemble optimal foraging. Psychological Review, 122, 558–569.

Alvarez

G. A.

(2011). Representing multiple objects as an ensemble enhances visual cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 122–131.

Barry

D. N.

Coogan

A. N.

Commins

(2016). The time course of systems consolidation of spatial memory from recent to remote retention: A comparison of the Immediate Early Genes Zif268, c-Fos and Arc. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 128, 46–55.

Bornstein

A. M.

Khaw

M. W.

Shohamy

Daw

N. D.

(2017). Reminders of past choices bias decisions for reward in humans. Nature Communications, 8, Article 15958. doi:10.1038/ncomms15958

Brainard

D. H.

(1997). The psychophysics toolbox. Spatial Vision, 10, 433–436.

Cai

D. J.

Aharoni

Shuman

Shobe

Biane

Song

. . . Silva

A. J.

(2016). A shared neural ensemble links distinct contextual memories encoded close in time. Nature, 534, 115–118.

Chun

M. M.

Jiang

(1998). Contextual cueing: Implicit learning and memory of visual context guides spatial attention. Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28–71.

Cornwell

B. R.

Johnson

L. L.

Holroyd

Carver

F. W.

Grillon

(2008). Human hippocampal and parahippocampal theta during goal-directed spatial navigation predicts performance on a virtual Morris water maze. The Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 5983–5990.

Fiser

Aslin

R. N.

(2001). Unsupervised statistical learning of higher-order spatial structures from visual scenes. Psychological Science, 12, 499–504.

10.

Judd

Collett

(1998). Multiple stored views and landmark guidance in ants. Nature, 392, 710–714.

11.

Leutgeb

J. K.

Treves

Moser

M.-B.

Moser

E. I.

(2004). Distinct ensemble codes in hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1. Science, 305, 1295–1298.

12.

McClelland

J. L.

McNaughton

B. L.

O’Reilly

R. C.

(1995). Why there are complementary learning systems in the hippocampus and neocortex: Insights from the successes and failures of connectionist models of learning and memory. Psychological Review, 102, 419–457.

13.

Morris

(1984). Developments of a water-maze procedure for studying spatial learning in the rat. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 11, 47–60.

14.

Richards

B. A.

Xia

Santoro

Husse

Woodin

M. A.

Josselyn

S. A.

Frankland

P. W.

(2014). Patterns across multiple memories are identified over time. Nature Neuroscience, 17, 981–986.

15.

Saffran

J. R.

Newport

E. L.

Aslin

R. N.

(1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606–621.

16.

Schapiro

A. C.

Turk-Browne

N. B.

Botvinick

M. M.

Norman

K. A.

(2017). Complementary learning systems within the hippocampus: A neural network modelling approach to reconciling episodic memory with statistical learning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 372, 20160049.

17.

Squire

L. R.

Alvarez

(1995). Retrograde amnesia and memory consolidation: A neurobiological perspective. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 5, 169–177.

18.

Turk-Browne

N. B.

Jungé

J. A.

Scholl

B. J.

(2005). The automaticity of visual statistical learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 552–564.

19.

Winocur

Moscovitch

(2011). Memory transformation and systems consolidation. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 17, 766–780.

20.

Woolley

D. G.

Mantini

Coxon

J. P.

D’Hooge

Swinnen

S. P.

Wenderoth

(2015). Virtual water maze learning in human increases functional connectivity between posterior hippocampus and dorsal caudate. Human Brain Mapping, 36, 1265–1277.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.58 MB

27.00 MB