If a rat has walked through a location before, it can imagine that place, with the help of virtual reality. Some now expect all mammals to be capable of such thoughts
Just like someone may look back on a treasured holiday, wishing they were still there, rats can also imagine being in places they’ve visited before.
The rats were trained to find certain shapes within the VR for a reward of sugary water. While they looked for these shapes, electrical signals were recorded from their hippocampus. The researchers used this data to produce a brain-machine interface that reverse engineered the signals produced by theThe latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.
In the first task, the rats had to imagine navigating to a particular shape they had already seen, for instance a circle, to receive sugary water. By envisaging locations in the VR that they had been through, the rats activated certain hippocampal cells, which was translated by the brain-machine interface into images in the VR.
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