Nucleus reuniens of the thalamus contains head direction cells
- Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Abstract
Discrete populations of brain cells signal heading direction, rather like a compass. These 'head direction' cells are largely confined to a closely-connected network of sites. We describe, for the first time, a population of head direction cells in nucleus reuniens of the thalamus in the freely-moving rat. This novel subcortical head direction signal potentially modulates the hippocampal CA fields directly and, thus, informs spatial processing and memory.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Howard Eichenbaum, Boston University, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Experiments were conducted in accordance with European Community directive, 86/609/EC, and the Cruelty toAnimals Act, 1876, and followed Bioresources Ethics Committee, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, as well as LAST Ireland and international guidelines of good practice. Surgery was conducted under ketamine/xylazine anaesthesia, an appropriate post-surgery monitoring and analgesia regime was in place, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Version history
- Received: April 13, 2014
- Accepted: July 11, 2014
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 14, 2014 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 31, 2014 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2014, Jankowski et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,913
- views
-
- 416
- downloads
-
- 85
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Nucleus reuniens of the thalamus contains head direction cells
eLife 3:e03075.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03075
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Probing memory of a complex visual image within a few hundred milliseconds after its disappearance reveals significantly greater fidelity of recall than if the probe is delayed by as little as a second. Classically interpreted, the former taps into a detailed but rapidly decaying visual sensory or ‘iconic’ memory (IM), while the latter relies on capacity-limited but comparatively stable visual working memory (VWM). While iconic decay and VWM capacity have been extensively studied independently, currently no single framework quantitatively accounts for the dynamics of memory fidelity over these time scales. Here, we extend a stationary neural population model of VWM with a temporal dimension, incorporating rapid sensory-driven accumulation of activity encoding each visual feature in memory, and a slower accumulation of internal error that causes memorized features to randomly drift over time. Instead of facilitating read-out from an independent sensory store, an early cue benefits recall by lifting the effective limit on VWM signal strength imposed when multiple items compete for representation, allowing memory for the cued item to be supplemented with information from the decaying sensory trace. Empirical measurements of human recall dynamics validate these predictions while excluding alternative model architectures. A key conclusion is that differences in capacity classically thought to distinguish IM and VWM are in fact contingent upon a single resource-limited WM store.
-
- Neuroscience
Our ability to recall details from a remembered image depends on a single mechanism that is engaged from the very moment the image disappears from view.
