Study reveals brain’s built-in distance tracker

Humans use lots of different types of information to make sure we don’t get lost. We can look out for familiar landmarks and use our sense of direction, but we can also estimate how far we have walked.

In new research from the University of St Andrews, published today in Current Biology, researchers from the Ainge Lab in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience trained rats to run a specific distance to get a reward. They then recorded from individual cells in the brain’s navigation system as the rats performed the task. Previous studies have shown that some of these cells have very regular peaks of activity, approximately every 30cm, like a neural pedometer. St Andrews researchers then changed the task environment so that the peaks of activity were less regular and found that the rats’ ability to estimate distance got worse.

The regularity of the pedometer-like signal was correlated with accuracy of distance estimation, suggesting that this is the neural signal that allows us to keep track of how far we have walked.

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