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Behavioural neuroscience: Rat navigation guided by remote control SANJIV K. TALWAR, SHAOHUA XU, EMERSON S. HAWLEY, SHENNAN A. WEISS, KAREN A. MOXON & JOHN K. CHAPIN The Nature, May 2002, 417: 37 - 38 . Procedures used to train laboratory animals often incorporate operant learning paradigms in which the animals are taught to produce particular responses to external cues (such as aural tones) in order to obtain rewards (such as food). By removing the physical contraints associated with the delivery of cues and rewards, learning paradigms based on brain microstimulation enable conditioning approaches to be used that help to transcend traditional boundaries in animal learning. Using this paradigm an experimenter can guide distant animals in a way similar to that used to control 'intelligent' robots.