Dolón Vera Laura, Dietz Birte, Manahan-Vaughan Denise
Ruhr University Bochum, Medical Faculty, Department of Neurophysiology, Universitätsstrasse 150, MA4/150, Bochum 44780, Germany.
Ruhr University Bochum, International Graduate School of Neuroscience, Universitätsstrasse 150, FNO 01, Bochum 44780, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Jul 3;34(7). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae202.
Sound is an important navigational cue for mammals. During spatial navigation, hippocampal place cells encode spatial representations of the environment based on visual information, but to what extent audiospatial information can enable reliable place cell mapping is largely unknown. We assessed this by recording from CA1 place cells in the dark, under circumstances where reliable visual, tactile, or olfactory information was unavailable. Male rats were exposed to auditory cues of different frequencies that were delivered from local or distal spatial locations. We observed that distal, but not local cue presentation, enables and supports stable place fields, regardless of the sound frequency used. Our data suggest that a context dependency exists regarding the relevance of auditory information for place field mapping: whereas locally available auditory cues do not serve as a salient spatial basis for the anchoring of place fields, auditory cue localization supports spatial representations by place cells when available in the form of distal information. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that CA1 neurons can effectively use auditory stimuli to generate place fields, and that hippocampal pyramidal neurons are not solely dependent on visual cues for the generation of place field representations based on allocentric reference frames.
声音是哺乳动物重要的导航线索。在空间导航过程中，海马体位置细胞基于视觉信息对环境进行空间表征编码，但听觉空间信息在多大程度上能够实现可靠的位置细胞映射，目前尚不清楚。我们通过在黑暗环境中记录CA1位置细胞来评估这一点，此时可靠的视觉、触觉或嗅觉信息均不可用。雄性大鼠暴露于从局部或远端空间位置传递的不同频率的听觉线索中。我们观察到，无论使用何种声音频率，远端而非局部线索呈现能够促成并支持稳定的位置野。我们的数据表明，在位置野映射中，听觉信息的相关性存在上下文依赖性：虽然局部可用的听觉线索不能作为位置野锚定的显著空间基础，但当以远端信息的形式可用时，听觉线索定位可支持位置细胞的空间表征。此外，我们的结果表明，CA1神经元能够有效地利用听觉刺激来生成位置野，并且海马体锥体细胞并非仅依赖视觉线索来基于以自我为中心的参考框架生成位置野表征。
