Maintained directional navigation across environments in the Morris water task is dependent on vestibular cues.

An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that an internally generated sense of spatial orientation contributes to navigation by rats in the Morris water task and to determine whether this strategy is dependent on vestibular cues. Rats were trained in a standard hidden platform procedure in which they received 8 daily swim trials. In a probe test, rats were carried in an opaque box to a pool located in a novel adjacent environment.