Abstract
Movement through space is a fundamental behavior for all animals. Cognitive maps of environments are encoded in the hippocampal formation in an allocentric reference frame, but motor movements that comprise physical navigation are represented within an egocentric reference frame. Allocentric navigational plans must be converted to an egocentric reference frame prior to implementation as overt behavior. Here we describe an egocentric spatial representation of environmental boundaries in the dorsomedial striatum.
Highlights
Movement through space is a fundamental behavior for all animals
Eighteen percent of recorded cells (171/939 cells) were identified with significant firing when a boundary occupied a specific orientation and distance relative to the animal based on the mean resultant length (MRL) of boundary directional firing exceeding the 99th percentile of a shuffled distribution (Fig. 1f) and responding stably across the two halves of a recording (Supplementary Fig. 3l, m)
The present work identified an egocentric representation of environmental boundaries consistent with theoretical predictions from computational models[7,8], which propose that allocentric spatial representations in the hippocampal formation are generated from and converted back to an egocentric spatial representation prior to behavioral output
Summary
Eighteen percent of recorded cells (171/939 cells) were identified with significant firing when a boundary occupied a specific orientation and distance relative to the animal based on the mean resultant length (MRL) of boundary directional firing exceeding the 99th percentile of a shuffled distribution (Fig. 1f) and responding stably across the two halves of a recording (Supplementary Fig. 3l, m). We termed these egocentric boundary cells (EBCs; EBCs per animal: mean = 42.75, range = 15–70; Fig. 1c, d, Supplementary Fig. 4).
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