Basnak Melanie A, Kutschireiter Anna, Okubo Tatsuo S, Chen Albert, Gorelik Pavel, Drugowitsch Jan, Wilson Rachel I
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2025 Aug;28(8):1729-1740. doi: 10.1038/s41593-024-01823-z. Epub 2025 Jul 23.
Navigation requires us to take account of multiple spatial cues with varying levels of informativeness and learn their spatial relationships. Here we investigate this process in the Drosophila head direction system, which functions as a ring attractor and a topographic map of head direction. Using population calcium imaging and multimodal virtual reality environments, we show that increasing cue informativeness improves encoding accuracy and produces a narrower and higher bump of activity. When cues conflict, the more informative cue exerts more weight. A familiar cue is weighted more heavily and used to guide the remapping of a less familiar cue. When a cue is less informative, it is remapped more readily in response to cue conflict. All these results can be explained by an attractor model with plastic sensory synapses. Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation for how the brain assembles spatial representations through inference and learning.
导航要求我们考虑具有不同信息量水平的多种空间线索，并学习它们的空间关系。在这里，我们在果蝇头部方向系统中研究这一过程，该系统作为一个环形吸引子和头部方向的地形图发挥作用。使用群体钙成像和多模态虚拟现实环境，我们表明增加线索信息量可提高编码准确性，并产生更窄且更高的活动峰值。当线索冲突时，信息量更大的线索权重更大。熟悉的线索权重更大，并用于引导不太熟悉的线索的重新映射。当一个线索信息量较小时，它会更容易因线索冲突而重新映射。所有这些结果都可以用一个具有可塑性感觉突触的吸引子模型来解释。我们的发现为大脑如何通过推理和学习组装空间表征提供了一个机制性解释。
