Dedication

To my family iv Over the past five decades spatial behavior has been a subject of research interest in psychology and neuroscience, in part based on philosophical theories of mental spatial representations. In order to continue uncovering the facts regarding spatial behavior, the focus of this thesis was on the contribution of entry point and visual inputs to the organization of exploratory locomotion and spatial representation in the rat. Despite the contribution of the hippocampus to spatial abilities, the exploratory locomotion is still visually organized in rats with damage to the hippocampus. On the other hand, recent studies have demonstrated a contribution of visual areas to the spatial ability of the rat. Nevertheless, the contribution of visual cortex to the organization of exploratory locomotion has not been studied in an open field. The experiments in this thesis were designed to characterize the organization of exploratory locomotion to th