The Maze

The Omniroute Maze is our second flagship apparatus, and was designed completely in-house by our team. This one-of-a kind apparatus features a set of cells surrounded by automated walls that can be raised and lowered to rapidly reconfigure routes available to a navigator. This allows us to ‘display’ traditional maze configurations used in spatial navigation research (T-maze, 8-arm maze etc.) or scale up to more complex mazes.

We plan to use this apparatus to investigate how the cognitive map, encoded in structures such as the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, may be able to perform generalizable functions in task conditions that are not tied to Euclidian space. Specifically, we will test if the cognitive map can represent simple spaces in the form of graphs. Here, routes and detours are tracked based on networks of paths (edges) between places (nodes). Graph-based route navigation tasks can assess navigation performance using fewer parameters, making it easier to systematically vary the complexity of the task. We seek to quantify when behavioural performance in rats and humans drops as the complexity increases, and identify a corresponding degradation of neural representations that may underlie these navigational behaviours.

Within this framework, we also plan to investigate how navigational function deteriorates during the progression of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). By testing AD-model rodents and human participants with preclinical AD, we hope to be able to develop a spatial navigation task that can reliably predict future AD conversion. No such diagnostic tests exist despite navigational impairments being among the earliest reported symptoms. Critically, an early and inexpensive behavioural model of AD could prolong and improve quality of life and keep patient’s health autonomy intact for longer.