“It’s all in their head”: hierarchical exploration of a three-dimensional layered pyramid in rats

Wayfinding in a three-dimensional (3D) environment is intricate, and surface-bounded animals may overcome this complexity by breaking it down into horizontal layers along with the vertical location of each layer. Here, we examined how rats explored a layered pyramid placed in a large open field. We found that exploration presented a hierarchical (or fractal) shape of three types of roundtrips: (1) from the primary home-base to the open-field floor; (2) from the floor up and down the pyramid levels; and (3) from local home-base on each pyramid level. Ascent was slow and interrupted, whereas descent was fast. This difference was a result of level altitude, remaining after data were normalized proportionally to level area. In contrast, the time spent and the distance traveled on each level were dependent on level area, not on level altitude. This structure of spatial behavior accords with multilevel exploration, presenting a relatively independent exploration of each level. The vertical dimension in this experiment thus did not alter the typical spatiotemporal behavior, and the 3D environment was explored by application of the same spatiotemporal approach as that of a horizontal open field. We suggest that this lack of alteration is due to the horizontal posture of the animal’s head and trunk during progression on the pyramid. This behavior also seems to fit the bicoding hypothesis, in which the vertical information is virtually contextual (non-metric), and so, when the rat progresses to a new level, it explores it as a newly accessed horizontal floor area.