The Map’s Design: Evolution’s Impact on Navigation and Spatial Cognition

Spatial cognition is fundamental to an animal's ability to move through and interact with its environment. Thus, understanding the physiological basis for this cognitive function and how it varies across taxa is fundamental to understanding how ecology alters brain architecture and function. Although elements of spatial cognition can be found across the animal kingdom, here we concentrate specifically on cognitive maps and their physiological basis. This will begin with a focus on the rodent model, which is the source of the vast majority of data on the neural basis of cognitive maps. This serves as a foundation for comparative analysis of other taxa to demonstrate that, although this line of inquiry is relatively new and small, important variations have been observed, tied largely to changes in both perception and ambulation, that may fundamentally alter how spatial cognition is implemented. This latter analysis emphasizes birds, as recent data in this order provide fundamental insights into how the selective pressures that drive changes in peripheral physiology also drive commensurate neuronal changes in spatial cognition.