Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Science. 2018 Jan 12;359(6372):218-224. doi: 10.1126/science.aao3474.
Social animals have to know the spatial positions of conspecifics. However, it is unknown how the position of others is represented in the brain. We designed a spatial observational-learning task, in which an observer bat mimicked a demonstrator bat while we recorded hippocampal dorsal-CA1 neurons from the observer bat. A neuronal subpopulation represented the position of the other bat, in allocentric coordinates. About half of these "social place-cells" represented also the observer's own position-that is, were place cells. The representation of the demonstrator bat did not reflect self-movement or trajectory planning by the observer. Some neurons represented also the position of inanimate moving objects; however, their representation differed from the representation of the demonstrator bat. This suggests a role for hippocampal CA1 neurons in social-spatial cognition.
社会性动物必须了解同类的空间位置。然而，目前尚不清楚其他动物的位置在大脑中是如何被表示的。我们设计了一个空间观察学习任务，在这个任务中，观察者蝙蝠模仿示范者蝙蝠，而我们则从观察者蝙蝠的海马背侧 CA1 神经元进行记录。一个神经元亚群以与自我无关的坐标来表示另一只蝙蝠的位置。这些“社交位置细胞”中约有一半也表示观察者自己的位置，也就是位置细胞。示范者蝙蝠的表示并不反映观察者的自身运动或轨迹规划。一些神经元还表示无生命移动物体的位置；然而，它们的表示与示范者蝙蝠的表示不同。这表明海马 CA1 神经元在社会空间认知中发挥作用。
