Johnson Adam, Seeland Kelsey, Redish A David
Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
Hippocampus. 2005;15(1):86-96. doi: 10.1002/hipo.20033.
Head direction cells change their firing rates as a function of the orientation of an animal within an environment. Typically, these cells display a unimodal tuning curve with maximal firing at the cell's preferred direction. As different cells have different preferred directions, the population of cells has been hypothesized to represent the orientation of the animal within the environment. Previous research has shown that pairs of simultaneously recorded head direction cells respond similarly to cue manipulations, suggesting that a population of head direction cells acts in concert to represent the animal's orientation within its environment. Ensembles of head direction cells were recorded from the postsubiculum from rats foraging in an open field. Directional responses of each cell were quantified by the nonparametric Watson's U2 statistic, a measure which makes no explicit assumptions of tuning curve shape. Directionally responsive cells were then used to reconstruct each animal's orientation within the open field using population vector, optimal-linear estimator, and Bayesian methods. The results indicated that postsubiculum contained a complete representation of the animal's orientation. The internal consistency of a neural ensemble can be assessed by comparing the ensemble activity to the expected activity given the reconstructed orientation. This has been termed the "coherency" of the neural ensemble. Reconstruction error decreased as the coherency of the orientation representation increased, indicating that coherency could be used to measure a level of confidence in the representation quality. Because coherency is a linear measure dependent only on internal variables, coherency may be a behaviorally relevant measure used to ascertain the animal's confidence in its representation of orientation.
头部方向细胞会根据动物在环境中的朝向改变其放电频率。通常,这些细胞呈现单峰调谐曲线,在细胞的偏好方向上放电频率最高。由于不同的细胞具有不同的偏好方向,因此推测细胞群体可代表动物在环境中的朝向。先前的研究表明,成对同时记录的头部方向细胞对线索操纵的反应相似,这表明一群头部方向细胞协同作用以代表动物在其环境中的朝向。从在开阔场地觅食的大鼠的后下托记录了头部方向细胞群。每个细胞的方向反应通过非参数的沃森U2统计量进行量化,该统计量对调谐曲线形状没有明确假设。然后使用方向反应性细胞,通过群体向量、最优线性估计器和贝叶斯方法重建每只动物在开阔场地中的朝向。结果表明,后下托包含动物朝向的完整表征。可以通过将群体活动与给定重建朝向的预期活动进行比较来评估神经群体的内部一致性。这被称为神经群体的“相干性”。随着朝向表征的相干性增加,重建误差减小,这表明相干性可用于衡量对表征质量的置信水平。由于相干性是仅依赖于内部变量的线性度量,相干性可能是一种行为相关度量,用于确定动物对其朝向表征的置信度。