Abstract
Like most animals, the survival of fish depends on navigation in space. This capacity has been documented in behavioral studies that have revealed navigation strategies. However, little is known about how freely swimming fish represent space and locomotion in the brain to enable successful navigation. Using a wireless neural recording system, we measured the activity of single neurons in the goldfish lateral pallium, a brain region known to be involved in spatial memory and navigation, while the fish swam freely in a two-dimensional water tank. We found that cells in the lateral pallium of the goldfish encode the edges of the environment, the fish head direction, the fish swimming speed, and the fish swimming velocity-vector. This study sheds light on how information related to navigation is represented in the brain of fish and addresses the fundamental question of the neural basis of navigation in this group of vertebrates.
Highlights
Like most animals, the survival of fish depends on navigation in space
To better understand space representation in non-mammalian vertebrates, we explored the neural substrate of navigation in the goldfish (Carassius auratus) as a representative of the teleost class
In order to characterize the encoding of space and locomotion in the goldfish lateral pallium, we measured single cell activity in the lateral pallium of freely behaving goldfish while they explored a water tank
Summary
The survival of fish depends on navigation in space. This capacity has been documented in behavioral studies that have revealed navigation strategies. To better understand space representation in non-mammalian vertebrates, we explored the neural substrate of navigation in the goldfish (Carassius auratus) as a representative of the teleost class. These fish are known to be able to navigate by exploiting either an allocentric or an egocentric frame of reference[24]. A lesion in the lateral areas of the pallium leads to impairment in allocentric spatial memory and learning, but not when the lesion affects other parts of the telencephalon[27] These findings are similar to results from lesions studies of the hippocampus in mammals and further strengthen the Scientific Reports | (2020) 10:14762. The goal of this study is to characterize the representation of spatial information in the teleost pallium
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