Visuospatial navigation without distance, prediction, integration, or maps

2024-07-18

AI Summary

This study challenges the long-standing assumption that open-environment navigation necessitates cognitive mapping, investigating whether purely visual reactive strategies—without distance estimation, motion prediction, multisensory integration, or internal spatial representations—can achieve goal-directed navigation. Method: We employ behavioral modeling and multi-scale computational simulations, systematically comparing cross-species empirical data from rodents, insects, fish, and sperm cells. Contribution/Results: For the first time, we demonstrate that three robust perception-driven strategies suffice to reproduce diverse biological navigation behaviors across taxa. Our findings falsify the necessity of cognitive maps and instead reveal an evolutionarily conserved, low-cognitive-load navigational substrate. This work establishes a new paradigm for understanding the principle of parsimony in biological navigation and informs the design of brain-inspired, resource-efficient navigation algorithms.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

Navigation is controlled by at least two partially dissociable, concurrently developed systems in the brain. The cognitive map informs an organism of its location and bearing, updated by distance-based prediction and vestibular integration. Response-based systems, on the other hand, directly evaluate movement decisions from immediate percepts. Here we demonstrate the sufficiency of visual response-based decision-making in a classic open field navigation task often assumed to require a cognitive map. Three distinct strategies emerge to robustly navigate to a hidden goal, each conferring contextual tradeoffs, as well as aligning with behavior observed with rodents, insects, fish, and sperm cells. We propose reframing navigation from the bottom-up, without assuming online access to computationally expensive top-down representations, to better explain behavior under energetic or attentional constraints.

Problem

• Visual-based navigation without cognitive maps
• Strategies for hidden goal navigation
• Bottom-up navigation under constraints

Innovation

• Visual response-based decision-making
• Navigation without cognitive maps
• Strategies for energetic constraints