Human spatial orientation and way-finding analysis with Ethovision in a real arena maze

Spatial orientation and way-finding performance of animals have already been objectively and extensively investigated with water maze tasks. More recently, virtual adaptations of water maze tasks have been used to investigate human spatial cognition and navigation. Despite the innovative technology of virtual reality, the actual maze experiment cannot always be replaced and we needed to create a human adaptation of the original Morris maze in our laboratory. Spatial orientation and way-finding performance such as platform finding time, route length, speed and orientation strategies based on the time spent in certain zones were obtained automatically from the locomotion of the subjects while completing a complex spatial orientation task