Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Cell Rep. 2021 Aug 3;36(5):109444. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109444. Epub 2021 Jul 21.
Animals behave in multisensory environments guided by various modalities of spatial information. Mammalian navigation engages a cognitive map of space in the hippocampus. Yet it is unknown whether and how this map incorporates multiple modalities of spatial information. Here, we establish two behavioral tasks in which mice navigate the same multisensory virtual environment by either pursuing a visual landmark or tracking an odor gradient. These tasks engage different proportions of visuo-spatial and olfacto-spatial mapping CA1 neurons and different population-level representations of each sensory-spatial coordinate. Switching between tasks results in global remapping. In a third task, mice pursue a target of varying sensory modality, and this engages modality-invariant neurons mapping the abstract behaviorally relevant coordinate irrespective of its physical modality. These findings demonstrate that the hippocampus does not necessarily map space as one coherent physical variable but as a combination of sensory and abstract reference frames determined by the subject's behavioral goal.
动物在多感觉环境中表现出行为，这些行为受到各种空间信息模态的引导。哺乳动物的导航依赖于海马体中的空间认知地图。然而，目前尚不清楚这个地图是否以及如何整合多种空间信息模态。在这里，我们建立了两个行为任务，在这两个任务中，老鼠通过追逐视觉地标或跟踪气味梯度来在相同的多感觉虚拟环境中导航。这些任务涉及不同比例的视空间和嗅空间映射 CA1 神经元，以及每个感觉空间坐标的不同群体水平表示。在任务之间切换会导致全局重映射。在第三个任务中，老鼠追逐具有不同感觉模态的目标，这会激活映射抽象行为相关坐标的不变模态神经元，而不考虑其物理模态。这些发现表明，海马体不一定将空间映射为一个连贯的物理变量，而是作为由主体的行为目标决定的感觉和抽象参考框架的组合。
