Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, University College London (UCL), 25 Howland Street, London W1T 4JG, United Kingdom.
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, University College London (UCL), 25 Howland Street, London W1T 4JG, United Kingdom.
Neuron. 2022 Feb 2;110(3):532-543.e9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.10.031. Epub 2021 Nov 16.
To successfully navigate the environment, animals depend on their ability to continuously track their heading direction and speed. Neurons that encode angular head velocity (AHV) are fundamental to this process, yet the contribution of various motion signals to AHV coding in the cortex remains elusive. By performing chronic single-unit recordings in the retrosplenial cortex (RSP) of the mouse and tracking the activity of individual AHV cells between freely moving and head-restrained conditions, we find that vestibular inputs dominate AHV signaling. Moreover, the addition of visual inputs onto these neurons increases the gain and signal-to-noise ratio of their tuning during active exploration. Psychophysical experiments and neural decoding further reveal that vestibular-visual integration increases the perceptual accuracy of angular self-motion and the fidelity of its representation by RSP ensembles. We conclude that while cortical AHV coding requires vestibular input, where possible, it also uses vision to optimize heading estimation during navigation.
为了成功地在环境中导航，动物依赖于其持续跟踪头部方向和速度的能力。编码角速度（AHV）的神经元是这个过程的基础，但各种运动信号对大脑皮层中 AHV 编码的贡献仍然难以捉摸。通过在小鼠的后穹窿皮层（RSP）中进行慢性单细胞记录，并在自由移动和头部固定条件下跟踪单个 AHV 细胞的活动，我们发现前庭输入主导 AHV 信号。此外，将视觉输入添加到这些神经元上会增加它们在主动探索过程中调谐的增益和信噪比。心理物理实验和神经解码进一步揭示，前庭-视觉整合提高了角运动的感知准确性及其由 RSP 集合表示的保真度。我们得出的结论是，虽然大脑皮层 AHV 编码需要前庭输入，但在可能的情况下，它也会利用视觉来优化导航过程中的航向估计。
