Place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by dissociable cognitive systems in mice

Significance The ability to recover one’s bearings when lost is critical for successful navigation. To accomplish this feat, a navigator must identify its current location (place recognition), and it must also recover its facing direction (heading retrieval). Using a novel behavioral paradigm, we demonstrate that mice use one set of cues to determine their location and then ignore these same cues when determining their heading, although the cues are informative in both cases. These results suggest that place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by different processing systems that operate in partial independence of each other. This finding has important implications for understanding the cognitive architecture underlying spatial navigation.