State key laboratory of Membrane biology, School of Life Sciences, Peking university, Beijing, 100871, China.
PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking university, Beijing, 100871, China.
Nat Commun. 2024 May 2;15(1):3702. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-47453-8.
Hippocampal place cells represent the position of a rodent within an environment. In addition, recent experiments show that the CA1 subfield of a passive observer also represents the position of a conspecific performing a spatial task. However, whether this representation is allocentric, egocentric or mixed is less clear. In this study we investigated the representation of others during free behavior and in a task where female mice learned to follow a conspecific for a reward. We found that most cells represent the position of others relative to self-position (social-vector cells) rather than to the environment, with a prevalence of purely egocentric coding modulated by context and mouse identity. Learning of a pursuit task improved the tuning of social-vector cells, but their number remained invariant. Collectively, our results suggest that the hippocampus flexibly codes the position of others in multiple coordinate systems, albeit favoring the self as a reference point.
海马体位置细胞代表了啮齿动物在环境中的位置。此外，最近的实验表明，被动观察的 CA1 子场也代表了执行空间任务的同种动物的位置。然而，这种表示是与环境无关的、以自我为中心的还是混合的，目前还不太清楚。在这项研究中，我们调查了在自由行为期间和在一项任务中其他动物的表现，在这项任务中，雌性老鼠学会跟随同种动物以获得奖励。我们发现，大多数细胞相对于自我位置（社会向量细胞）而不是相对于环境来表示他人的位置，而由上下文和老鼠身份调制的纯粹以自我为中心的编码占主导地位。追逐任务的学习提高了社会向量细胞的调谐，但它们的数量保持不变。总的来说，我们的结果表明，海马体在多个坐标系中灵活地对他人的位置进行编码，尽管它倾向于以自我为参考点。
