Aronov, D. & Tank, D.W. Neuron 84, 442–456 (2014).

Visually guided animal behaviors and their underlying neural representations are ideally studied in an environment that is as close to reality as possible. Aronov and Tank describe a complete virtual reality system for rats that allows the animals to rotate and walk on a treadmill in any direction while at the same time allowing the researchers to perform extracellular recording of the neural activity in these animals. With this system, the researchers recorded the activity from thousands of neurons while the rats explored their environment or pursued sites with a visible or hidden reward. In principle, it will be feasible to analyze the response of neurons even to stimuli that are not possible in the real world.