Hartley Tom, Lever Colin, Burgess Neil, O'Keefe John
Department of Psychology, University of York, , York, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Dec 23;369(1635):20120510. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0510. Print 2014 Feb 5.
Over the past four decades, research has revealed that cells in the hippocampal formation provide an exquisitely detailed representation of an animal's current location and heading. These findings have provided the foundations for a growing understanding of the mechanisms of spatial cognition in mammals, including humans. We describe the key properties of the major categories of spatial cells: place cells, head direction cells, grid cells and boundary cells, each of which has a characteristic firing pattern that encodes spatial parameters relating to the animal's current position and orientation. These properties also include the theta oscillation, which appears to play a functional role in the representation and processing of spatial information. Reviewing recent work, we identify some themes of current research and introduce approaches to computational modelling that have helped to bridge the different levels of description at which these mechanisms have been investigated. These range from the level of molecular biology and genetics to the behaviour and brain activity of entire organisms. We argue that the neuroscience of spatial cognition is emerging as an exceptionally integrative field which provides an ideal test-bed for theories linking neural coding, learning, memory and cognition.
在过去的四十年里，研究表明海马结构中的细胞能够极其精确地呈现动物当前的位置和行进方向。这些发现为深入理解包括人类在内的哺乳动物的空间认知机制奠定了基础。我们描述了主要类别空间细胞的关键特性：位置细胞、头部方向细胞、网格细胞和边界细胞，每一类细胞都有其独特的放电模式，用于编码与动物当前位置和方向相关的空间参数。这些特性还包括θ振荡，它似乎在空间信息的表征和处理中发挥着功能性作用。回顾近期的研究工作，我们确定了当前研究的一些主题，并介绍了计算建模方法，这些方法有助于弥合在不同描述层面上对这些机制进行研究的差距，这些层面涵盖了从分子生物学和遗传学层面到整个生物体的行为和大脑活动层面。我们认为，空间认知神经科学正逐渐成为一个极具综合性的领域，它为连接神经编码、学习、记忆和认知的理论提供了一个理想的试验平台。
