Place-related neural responses in the monkey hippocampal formation in a virtual space

Hori, Etsuro; Nishio, Y; Kazui, Kenichi; Umeno, Ken; Tabuchi, Eiichi; Sasaki, Kohsuke; Endo, Shunro; Ono, Taketoshi; Nishijo, Hisao

doi:10.1002/hipo.20108

Cited by 55 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Place cells encode the patient's presence at a specific location, spiking only when the patient is at a particular position and facing a certain direction. The critical difference between path and place cells is that path cells continuously encode direction across the environment, whereas place cells activate only at specific locations and otherwise are silent (4,6,22).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A sense of direction in human entorhinal cortex

Jacobs

Kahana

Ekstrom

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

158

134

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Finding our way in spatial environments is an essential part of daily life. How do we come to possess this sense of direction? Extensive research points to the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (EC) as key neural structures underlying spatial navigation. To better understand this system, we examined recordings of single-neuron activity from neurosurgical patients playing a virtual-navigation video game. In addition to place cells, which encode the current virtual location, we describe a unique cell type, EC path cells, the activity of which indicates whether the patient is taking a clockwise or counterclockwise path around the virtual square road. We find that many EC path cells exhibit this directional activity throughout the environment, in contrast to hippocampal neurons, which primarily encode information about specific locations. More broadly, these findings support the hypothesis that EC encodes general properties of the current context (e.g., location or direction) that are used by hippocampus to build unique representations reflecting combinations of these properties.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A sense of direction in human entorhinal cortex

Jacobs

Kahana

Ekstrom

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

158

134

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Neurons in CA1 and CA3 remap their place fields upon changes made in the environment, as demonstrated in rodents (13)(14)(15)(16)(17), Chiroptera (35), and primates (36). Because the adaptive remapping of hippocampal place fields is a relatively fast and EC-dependent process (13,37), it is plausible to assume that neurons in the EC are endowed with some degree of flexibility.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, considering the complexity and scalability of human environments, humans might rely on extracting information from optic flow more efficiently than rats do, given that there is theoretically sufficient information available from optic flow for grid formation (45). The predominance of visual input in the human brain allows detection and mapping of spatial cues more quickly and may influence grid parameters to a greater degree than is possible in the rat brain (35)(36)(37). It might also allow the human hippocampus and EC to perform more naturally in virtual navigation tasks, where proprioceptive and kinesthetic cues are absent (30,31,46,47).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context-dependent spatially periodic activity in the human entorhinal cortex

Nádasdy

Nguyen

Török

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The spatially periodic activity of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) of the rodent, primate, and human provides a coordinate system that, together with the hippocampus, informs an individual of its location relative to the environment and encodes the memory of that location. Among the most defining features of grid-cell activity are the 60°rotational symmetry of grids and preservation of grid scale across environments. Grid cells, however, do display a limited degree of adaptation to environments. It remains unclear if this level of environment invariance generalizes to human grid-cell analogs, where the relative contribution of visual input to the multimodal sensory input of the EC is significantly larger than in rodents. Patients diagnosed with nontractable epilepsy who were implanted with entorhinal cortical electrodes performing virtual navigation tasks to memorized locations enabled us to investigate associations between grid-like patterns and environment. Here, we report that the activity of human entorhinal cortical neurons exhibits adaptive scaling in grid period, grid orientation, and rotational symmetry in close association with changes in environment size, shape, and visual cues, suggesting scale invariance of the frequency, rather than the wavelength, of spatially periodic activity. Our results demonstrate that neurons in the human EC represent space with an enhanced flexibility relative to neurons in rodents because they are endowed with adaptive scalability and context dependency.grid cell | spatial memory | entorhinal cortex | single unit | human

show abstract

“…Also, to develop a cognitive map, rats have to locomote across the parts of the environment that they will come to represent [34][35][36]. In contrast, human and nonhuman primates can represent an environment by viewing it, without having to locomote over each portion to be represented [37][38][39][40][41]. Thus, unlike primates, rats' sensory world is often tied to the region just beyond their noses, whiskers and paws.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The reach-to-grasp-food task for rats: A rare case of modularity in animal behavior?

Hermer-Vazquez

Chapin

2007

Behavioural Brain Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Humans and nonhuman animals make use of sensory hierarchies in "selecting" strategies for solving many cognitive and behavioral tasks. Often, if a preferred type of sensory information is unavailable or is not useful for solving a given task, the animal can switch to a lower-priority strategy, making use of a different class of sensory information. In the case of rats performing a classic reach-to-graspfood task, however, prior studies indicate that the reaching maneuver may be a fixed action pattern that is guided exclusively by the food's odor plume until the point of contact with the food morsel [1][2][3]. We sought to confirm and extend these findings in several ways. In Experiment 1, using a GO/NO-GO variant of the classic task, we demonstrated that rats used the GO target's odor both to trigger and guide their reaches. In Experiment 2, we showed that rats deprived of (a) vision, (b) object-recognizing rostral whiskers and forearm sinus hairs, or (c) both, displayed no deficits in triggering and guiding their reaches. Finally, in a third experiment in which the GO target's location varied randomly across trials and only olfactory cues were available, we demonstrated that rats could determine the spatial endpoint of their reach without any loss of accuracy. Combined with results from a prior study in which bulbectomized rats never developed a new, successful reaching strategy despite extensive post-operative training [1], these results indicate that rats do not have a sensory hierarchy for solving the reach-to-grasp-food task, but rather, are guided by olfaction alone until their paw contacts the food morsel.

show abstract

Place-related neural responses in the monkey hippocampal formation in a virtual space

Cited by 55 publications

References 39 publications

A sense of direction in human entorhinal cortex

A sense of direction in human entorhinal cortex

Context-dependent spatially periodic activity in the human entorhinal cortex

The reach-to-grasp-food task for rats: A rare case of modularity in animal behavior?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About