Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
J Neurophysiol. 2020 Apr 1;123(4):1392-1406. doi: 10.1152/jn.00518.2019. Epub 2020 Feb 26.
The home is a unique location in the life of humans and animals. In rats, home presents itself as a multicompartmental space that involves integrating navigation through subspaces. Here we embedded the laboratory rat's home cage in the arena, while recording neurons in the animal's parasubiculum and medial entorhinal cortex, two brain areas encoding the animal's location and head direction. We found that head direction signals were unaffected by home cage presence or translocation. Head direction cells remain globally stable and have similar properties inside and outside the embedded home. We did not observe egocentric bearing encoding of the home cage. However, grid cells were distorted in the presence of the home cage. While they did not globally remap, single firing fields were translocated toward the home. These effects appeared to be geometrical in nature rather than a home-specific distortion and were not dependent on explicit behavioral use of the home cage during a hoarding task. Our work suggests that medial entorhinal cortex and parasubiculum do not remap after embedding the home, but local changes in grid cell activity overrepresent the embedded space location and might contribute to navigation in complex environments. Neural findings in the field of spatial navigation come mostly from an abstract approach that separates the animal from even a minimally biological context. In this article we embed the home cage of the rat in the environment to address some of the complexities of natural navigation. We find no explicit home cage representation. While both head direction cells and grid cells remain globally stable, we find that embedded spaces locally distort grid cells.
家是人类和动物生活中的一个独特场所。在老鼠中，家呈现为一个多隔间的空间，涉及到通过子空间进行导航。在这里，我们将实验室老鼠的家笼嵌入到竞技场中，同时记录动物的副隔核和内侧内嗅皮层中的神经元，这两个脑区编码着动物的位置和头部方向。我们发现，头部方向信号不受家笼存在或转移的影响。头部方向细胞在嵌入的家内和家外保持全局稳定，具有相似的特性。我们没有观察到家笼的自我中心方位编码。然而，网格细胞在存在家笼时会发生扭曲。虽然它们没有全局重映射，但单个放电场会向家转移。这些效应似乎具有几何性质，而不是特定于家的扭曲，并且不依赖于在囤积任务中对家笼的明确行为使用。我们的工作表明，内侧内嗅皮层和副隔核在嵌入家后不会重映射，但网格细胞活动的局部变化会过度表示嵌入空间的位置，并可能有助于在复杂环境中的导航。空间导航领域的神经发现主要来自于一种抽象的方法，该方法将动物与甚至最小的生物背景隔离开来。在本文中，我们将老鼠的家笼嵌入到环境中，以解决自然导航的一些复杂性。我们没有发现明确的家笼表示。虽然头部方向细胞和网格细胞都保持全局稳定，但我们发现嵌入的空间会局部扭曲网格细胞。
