Animals ability to move Spatial cognition

 

Animals (Basel). 2025 Dec 17;15(24):3628. doi: 10.3390/ani15243628

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

Isabella S Olynik-McLaughlin 1, Diano F Marrone 1,*

Editor: Garikoitz Azkona1

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

For mobile animals, efficient navigation is a key component of survival. 

Navigation permits both approach to rewards and escape from threats.

 Given the potential benefits to be reaped from better understanding space, it is perhaps not surprising that elements of spatial cognition can be found across the animal kingdom.

 Upon this foundation, however, evolution has sculpted additional cognitive abilities to enable progressively more complex strategies suited to varying ecological niches, culminating in the cognitive map.

 Understanding how cognitive maps are implemented physiologically and (importantly) how this implementation varies across taxa promises to deepen our understanding both of the basis for spatial cognition in general and 

of how it is shaped by pressures in the natural environment.

Decades of research have been conducted on this topic and have built a relatively comprehensive model for how spatial cognition supports navigation and memory. 

Here we first describe many of the general themes that have been uncovered to date in our understanding of spatial cognition, focusing on the rodent model.

 This provides a foundation for comparing how variations in these basic principles shape the implementation of spatial cognition across taxa. This latter analysis will focus on recent data, particularly from birds, that have fundamental implications for our understanding of how evolution sculpts the neural architecture underlying spatial cognition. Before focusing on cognitive maps, however, it is worth providing some context on the maps relative to other strategies of navigation, such as path integration.