Nguyen Duc, Wang Garret, Gu Yi
Spatial Navigation and Memory Unit, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Current address: Center of Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
bioRxiv. 2024 Jan 17:2024.01.09.574924. doi: 10.1101/2024.01.09.574924.
Animals employ spatial information in multisensory modalities to navigate their natural environments. However, it is unclear whether the brain encodes such information in separate cognitive maps or integrates all into a single, universal map. We addressed this question in the microcircuit of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), a cognitive map of space. Using cellular-resolution calcium imaging, we examined the MEC of mice navigating virtual reality tracks, where visual and auditory cues provided comparable spatial information. We uncovered two cell types: "unimodality cells" and "multimodality cells". The unimodality cells specifically represent either auditory or visual spatial information. They are anatomically intermingled and maintain sensory preferences across multiple tracks and behavioral states. The multimodality cells respond to both sensory modalities with their responses shaped differentially by auditory and visual information. Thus, the MEC enables accurate spatial encoding during multisensory navigation by computing spatial information in different sensory modalities and generating distinct maps.
动物利用多感官模态中的空间信息在自然环境中导航。然而，尚不清楚大脑是在单独的认知地图中编码此类信息，还是将所有信息整合到一个单一的通用地图中。我们在内侧内嗅皮层（MEC）的微回路中解决了这个问题，MEC是一个空间认知地图。使用细胞分辨率钙成像，我们检查了在虚拟现实轨道中导航的小鼠的MEC，其中视觉和听觉线索提供了可比的空间信息。我们发现了两种细胞类型：“单模态细胞”和“多模态细胞”。单模态细胞专门代表听觉或视觉空间信息。它们在解剖学上相互交织，并在多个轨道和行为状态下保持感觉偏好。多模态细胞对两种感觉模态都有反应，其反应由听觉和视觉信息以不同方式塑造。因此，MEC通过计算不同感觉模态中的空间信息并生成不同的地图，在多感官导航期间实现准确的空间编码。
