ELIZABETH PETTY, Gequasha Collins, Kiran Long-Iyer, Jessica Paul, Rachel Blaser, and Jena Hales
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a spatial navigational task that differs from many other behavioral techniques because it allows the observation of behavior in a more naturalistic setting. The goal of the task is not to verify if an animal can do a certain behavior, but to record how the animal behaves in natural foraging conditions. This task involves a variety of cognitive functions, such as spatial processing, memory, attention, route planning, and decision making. Given the established role of the hippocampus in both spatial processing and spatial memory, we examined how hippocampal damage affects rats' performance in the TSP. The rats were trained on the TSP, which involved learning to retrieve bait from targets in a variety of spatial configurations. Rats were then divided into two groups, matched for performance, with one group receiving a hippocampal lesion and the other a control sham surgery. After recovering from surgery, the rats were tested on eight new configurations. A variety of behavioral measures were recorded, including distance traveled, number of revisits, span, and latency. The results showed that the sham group outperformed the lesion group on most of these measures, with the lesion group demonstrating more pronounced impairment on the more complex configurations. Based on histological tissue analysis of each group, we determined that the hippocampus appears to be involved in finding efficient routes, particularly in complex versions
of the TSP.