Psychology Department, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
Nat Neurosci. 2021 Feb;24(2):266-275. doi: 10.1038/s41593-020-00761-w. Epub 2020 Dec 21.
Successfully navigating in physical or semantic space requires a neural representation of allocentric (map-based) vectors to boundaries, objects and goals. Cognitive processes such as path-planning and imagination entail the recall of vector representations, but evidence of neuron-level memory for allocentric vectors has been lacking. Here, we describe a novel neuron type, vector trace cell (VTC), whose firing generates a new vector field when a cue is encountered and a 'trace' version of that field for hours after cue removal. VTCs are concentrated in subiculum, distal to CA1. Compared to non-trace cells, VTCs fire at further distances from cues and exhibit earlier-going shifts in preferred theta phase in response to newly introduced cues, which demonstrates a theta-linked neural substrate for memory encoding. VTCs suggest a vector-based model of computing spatial relationships between an agent and multiple spatial objects, or between different objects, freed from the constraints of direct perception of those objects.
成功地在物理或语义空间中导航需要对以自我为中心（基于地图）的向量到边界、物体和目标进行神经表示。路径规划和想象等认知过程需要回忆向量表示，但缺乏对以自我为中心的向量的神经元水平记忆的证据。在这里，我们描述了一种新型的神经元类型，即向量轨迹细胞（VTC），当遇到提示时，其放电会产生一个新的向量场，并且在提示去除后数小时内会产生该场的“轨迹”版本。VTC 集中在海马旁回，远离 CA1。与非轨迹细胞相比，VTC 在距离提示更远的地方发射，并对新引入的提示表现出更早的θ相位偏好变化，这证明了记忆编码的与θ相关的神经基质。VTC 提出了一种基于向量的模型，用于计算主体与多个空间物体或不同物体之间的空间关系，从而摆脱了直接感知这些物体的限制。
