Spatial navigation, working memory and sensory sensitivity: Insights from virtual reality

To navigate through space, animals must integrate information from the environment. However, what they perceive depends on how they move through it. For example, depending on the direction of movement, they may experience different gradients in the intensity of a stimulus. This puts both their sensitivity to changes in the stimulus and their working memory to the test. To investigate this interaction, we examine how zebrafish larvae adapt their navigation strategies to variations in light intensity across controlled temporal and spatial scales. Taking advantage of their well-characterized phototactic behavior, we develop a spatial navigation paradigm in a virtual reality environment. This requires implementing customized artificial intelligence algorithms to determine the larva’s virtual trajectory in real time, while presenting light stimuli according to the virtual testing arena. Ultimately, this approach will allow us to perform the same experiments under a light-sheet microscope to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the task. We will present preliminary results with the aim of discussing the proposed experiments and their possible interpretations with the community.