Fig 1.
Appearance of the Rattractor system.
The rat was stimulated in the MFB as it entered the virtual cage indicated with a circle.
Fig 2.
(a) Stimulator circuit to generate bipolar current stimuli. (b) Electrode unit with two electrode needles and two references.
Fig 3.
A set of 10 square pulses were generated with our circuit to apply bipolar current stimuli (left); temporal closeup around the first pulse (right).
Fig 4.
A graphical user interface (GUI) was developed to show the rat’s position (white circle) and heading direction (bar) as well as the stimulated region (i.e., virtual cage), drawn as a dark yellow circle and manually positioned by the experimenter using the mouse cursor.
The red color around the rat position indicates that the subject is electrically stimulated at that time.
Fig 5.
In each image, a red circle indicates the stimulated site and the gray area surrounded by a blue outline highlights the MFB region superimposed on a coronal section of a stereotaxic atlas image [21].
Fig 6.
Typical rat trajectory without electrical stimulation in the brain (null condition; left), and a trajectory under stimulation in the MFB as the rat stayed in the virtual cage indicated by a circle (right).
Fig 7.
Line plots showing the temporal changes of the distance metric d throughout the sessions.
The bar plots underneath compare the count of bins where the distance metric d stayed <0.1 [m]. The analyses were conducted on POW 1 and 2 sessions for the subjects C, F, and I.
Fig 8.
Line plots showing temporal changes in the distance metric d throughout sessions.
Bar plots at the bottom comparing bin counts where the distance metric d was <0.1 [m]. The analyses were conducted on subjects A, B, E, and H during the POW 1 session.
Fig 9.
Histogram indicating the time s that the rat stayed on a specific location without stimulation (left), and in the virtual cage indicated by a red circle with stimuli in the MFB (right), respectively.
Fig 10.
The plot above shows a two-dimensional trajectory of subject C (light blue) and the virtual cage (dark red), which was manually moved.
The numbers show elapsed time s since the beginning of the session. The two plots below show temporal changes in x and y coordinates.