Dissociating spatial strategies in animal research: Critical methodological review with focus on egocentric navigation and the hippocampus

•Multiple reference frames are often available to animals in paradigms extensively used to study spatial learning.•Unaccounted reference frames can manifest as confounding factors, cause spurious associations and invalid inferences.•Directional learning predominates over place learning in widely used paradigms such as the Morris water maze and cross-maze.•We propose a decision-algorithm that serves as an example of how to approach the problem with multiple reference frames.•Hippocampus mediates complex egocentric learning whereas its role in response learning and path integration is controversial.