Abstract
Animals integrate multiple sensory inputs to successfully navigate in their environments. Head direction (HD), boundary vector, grid and place cells in the entorhinal-hippocampal network form the brain’s navigational system that allows to identify the animal’s current location, but how the functions of these specialized neuron types are acquired remain to be understood. Here we report that activity of HD neurons is influenced by the ambulatory constraints imposed upon the animal by the boundaries of the explored environment, leading to spurious spatial information. However, in the post-subiculum, the main cortical stage of HD signal processing, HD neurons convey true spatial information in the form of border modulated activity through the integration of additional sensory modalities relative to egocentric position, unlike their driving thalamic inputs. These findings demonstrate how the combination of HD and egocentric information can be transduced into a spatial code.
Highlights
Animals integrate multiple sensory inputs to successfully navigate in their environments
Since not all head directions can be displayed near the walls, this bias results in a non-uniform distribution of spikes, as illustrated for an example Head direction (HD) neuron from the antero-dorsal nucleus of the thalamus (ADn) (Supplementary Fig. 1a)
The low unbiased spatial information of ADn HD neurons shows that tthey were only modulated by the head-direction (Supplementary Fig. 1b–d)
Summary
Animals integrate multiple sensory inputs to successfully navigate in their environments. In the post-subiculum, the main cortical stage of HD signal processing, HD neurons convey true spatial information in the form of border modulated activity through the integration of additional sensory modalities relative to egocentric position, unlike their driving thalamic inputs. These findings demonstrate how the combination of HD and egocentric information can be transduced into a spatial code. HD cells in the PoSub convey true spatial information by combining the allocentric HD information with body-centered, egocentric signals, such as the relationship between the ambulatory pattern of the mouse and boundaries of the environment Such conjunction may be the first stage of computation that integrates primary information to establish the cognitive map
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