Golob E J, Stackman R W, Wong A C, Taube J S
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.
Behav Neurosci. 2001 Apr;115(2):285-304.
Current theories assume that rats use the directional information reflected by head direction (HD) cells when performing spatial tasks. This assumption was assessed by monitoring anterior thalamic HD cell activity and relating it to the subject's behavioral response on 2 spatial memory tasks that tested either reference memory or working memory. In both tasks, there was a significant number of trials where there was not a tight coupling between the preferred firing direction of HD cells and the direction of the behavioral response. In addition, it was possible to intentionally change the preferred direction of HD cells without affecting performance accuracy. An additional experiment showed that manipulations that affected internal, but not external, cues impaired performance on the reference memory task. These findings suggest that HD cell activity was not consistently guiding the subjects' behavior on these 2 spatial tasks.
当前的理论认为，大鼠在执行空间任务时会利用头部方向（HD）细胞所反映的方向信息。通过监测丘脑前HD细胞的活动，并将其与受试者在两项测试参考记忆或工作记忆的空间记忆任务中的行为反应相关联，对这一假设进行了评估。在这两项任务中，都有相当数量的试验，其中HD细胞的偏好放电方向与行为反应方向之间没有紧密的耦合。此外，有可能在不影响性能准确性的情况下有意改变HD细胞的偏好方向。另一项实验表明，影响内部而非外部线索的操作会损害参考记忆任务的表现。这些发现表明，HD细胞的活动在这两项空间任务中并没有始终如一地指导受试者的行为。
