Visuospatial navigation without distance, prediction, integration, or maps

Abstract: Navigation is controlled by at least two partially dissociable, concurrently developed systems in the brain. The cognitive map informs an organism of its location and bearing, updated by distance-based prediction and vestibular integration. Response-based systems, on the other hand, directly evaluate movement decisions from immediate percepts. Here we demonstrate the sufficiency of visual response-based decision-making in a classic open field navigation task often assumed to require a cognitive map. Three distinct strategies emerge to robustly navigate to a hidden goal, each conferring contextual tradeoffs, as well as aligning with behavior observed with rodents, insects, fish, and sperm cells. We propose reframing navigation from the bottom-up, without assuming online access to computationally expensive top-down representations, to better explain behavior under energetic or attentional constraints.