Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2017 Oct 26;20(11):1465-1473. doi: 10.1038/nn.4658.
In this Perspective, we evaluate current progress in understanding how the brain encodes our sense of direction, within the context of parallel work focused on how early vestibular pathways encode self-motion. In particular, we discuss how these systems work together and provide evidence that they involve common mechanisms. We first consider the classic view of the head direction cell and results of recent experiments in rodents and primates indicating that inputs to these neurons encode multimodal information during self-motion, such as proprioceptive and motor efference copy signals, including gaze-related information. We also consider the paradox that, while the head-direction network is generally assumed to generate a fixed representation of perceived directional heading, this computation would need to be dynamically updated when the relationship between voluntary motor command and its sensory consequences changes. Such situations include navigation in virtual reality and head-restricted conditions, since the natural relationship between visual and extravisual cues is altered.
在本观点中，我们评估了当前在理解大脑如何编码我们的方向感方面的进展，这是在关注早期前庭途径如何编码自身运动的平行工作的背景下进行的。特别是，我们讨论了这些系统如何协同工作，并提供了它们涉及共同机制的证据。我们首先考虑了头方向细胞的经典观点以及最近在啮齿动物和灵长类动物中的实验结果，这些结果表明，这些神经元的输入在自身运动期间编码了多模态信息，例如本体感受和运动传出副本信号，包括与注视相关的信息。我们还考虑了一个悖论，即尽管头方向网络通常被认为产生感知方向的固定表示，但当自愿运动命令与其感觉后果之间的关系发生变化时，这种计算需要动态更新。这种情况包括在虚拟现实和头部受限条件下的导航，因为视觉和非视觉线索之间的自然关系发生了变化。
