Department of Neuroscience, The Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, The Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Neuroscience, The Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, The Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Curr Biol. 2022 Oct 24;32(20):R1085-R1089. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.080.
Finding the kitchen refrigerator in the middle of a sleepless night or arriving at the home parking lot at the end of a daily drive are things that we mostly take for granted. However, such feats rely on complex brain computations that integrate multiple environmental and internal cues. Together these computations mediate the process referred to as spatial cognition, the study of which has been one of the most active research fields in modern neuroscience. In the early 1970s, John O'Keefe recorded the activity of individual cells in the hippocampus of a freely moving rat: he found cells that fired action potentials when the rat passed through a specific place in the environment. Examining the activity pattern of such 'place cells', he concluded that the hippocampus may contain a 'cognitive map' that represents the animal's location in its proximate environment. Since O'Keefe's seminal discovery about half a century ago, extensive research has led to a detailed characterization of hippocampal space processing in rats and other mammalian species.
在失眠的深夜找到厨房冰箱，或者在一天的驾驶结束后到达家庭停车场，这些都是我们认为理所当然的事情。然而，这些壮举依赖于将多种环境和内部线索整合在一起的复杂大脑计算。这些计算共同介导了被称为空间认知的过程，对其的研究一直是现代神经科学中最活跃的研究领域之一。20 世纪 70 年代初，约翰·奥基夫（John O'Keefe）记录了自由移动的老鼠海马体中单个细胞的活动：他发现当老鼠经过环境中的特定位置时，细胞会发射动作电位。通过检查这种“位置细胞”的活动模式，他得出结论，海马体可能包含一个“认知地图”，代表动物在其周围环境中的位置。自奥基夫（O'Keefe）半个多世纪前的开创性发现以来，广泛的研究已经对大鼠和其他哺乳动物物种中海马体的空间处理进行了详细描述。
