Coexistence of Cue-specific and Cue-independent Spatial Representations for Landmarks and Self-motion Cues in Human Retrosplenial Cortex

Chen, Xiaoli; Wei, Ziwei; Wolbers, Thomas

doi:10.1101/2022.05.16.491990

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Nevertheless, it is conceivable that fMRI adaptation interrogates different aspects of the underlying neural codes compared with other measures, such as univariate mass activation and multi-voxel activation pattern similarity in the study of Huffman and Ekstrom (2019) and neuronal spiking activity in the study of Mao et al (2017) . These methodological differences may explain the disparities between the current study and the two prior studies, highlighting the importance of employing complementary measurements to obtain a more complete picture of how the brain processes various spatial cues during navigation ( Chen et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Repetition Suppression Reveals Cue-Specific Spatial Representations for Landmarks and Self-Motion Cues in the Human Retrosplenial Cortex

Chen,

Wei,

Wolbers

2024

eNeuro

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The efficient use of various spatial cues within a setting is crucial for successful navigation. Two fundamental forms of spatial navigation, landmark-based and self-motion-based, engage distinct cognitive mechanisms. The question of whether these modes invoke shared or separate spatial representations in the brain remains unresolved. While non-human animal studies have yielded inconsistent results, human investigation is limited. In our previous work (Chen et al., 2019), we introduced a novel spatial navigation paradigm utilizing ultra-high field fMRI to explore neural coding of positional information. We found that different entorhinal subregions in the right hemisphere encode positional information for landmarks and self-motion cues. The present study tested the generalizability of our previous finding with a modified navigation paradigm. Although we did not replicate our previous finding in the entorhinal cortex, we identified adaptation-based allocentric positional codes for both cue types in the retrosplenial cortex, which were not confounded by the path to the spatial location. However, the multi-voxel patterns of these spatial codes differed between the cue types, suggesting cue-specific positional coding. The parahippocampal cortex exhibited positional coding for self-motion cues, which was not dissociable from path length. Finally, the brain regions involved in successful navigation differed from our previous study, indicating overall distinct neural mechanisms recruited in our two studies. Taken together, the current findings demonstrate cue-specific allocentric positional coding in the human retrosplenial cortex in the same navigation task for the first time, and that spatial representations in the brain are contingent on specific experimental conditions.Significance StatementEffective navigation depends on efficient utilization of various spatial cues within an environment. Understanding how neural representations derived from distinct spatial cues relate — whether they are cue-specific or cue-independent — is paramount. The current study employed desktop virtual reality, ultra-high-field fMRI, and a novel repetition suppression paradigm that contrasted landmarks and self-motion cues. While not replicating our previous finding of positional coding in the entorhinal cortex under the new experimental conditions, the current study reveals cue-specific allocentric neural representations of spatial locations in the human retrosplenial cortex for the first time. This finding enriches our understanding of how the brain processes diverse sources of spatial information for cognitive map formation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%