Spatial cell firing during virtual navigation of open arenas by head-restrained mice
- University College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
We present a mouse virtual reality (VR) system which restrains head-movements to horizontal rotations, compatible with multi-photon imaging. This system allows expression of the spatial navigation and neuronal firing patterns characteristic of real open arenas (R). Comparing VR to R: place and grid, but not head-direction, cell firing had broader spatial tuning; place, but not grid, cell firing was more directional; theta frequency increased less with running speed; whereas increases in firing rates with running speed and place and grid cells' theta phase precession were similar. These results suggest that the omni-directional place cell firing in R may require local-cues unavailable in VR, and that the scale of grid and place cell firing patterns, and theta frequency, reflect translational motion inferred from both virtual (visual and proprioceptive) and real (vestibular translation and extra-maze) cues. By contrast, firing rates and theta phase precession appear to reflect visual and proprioceptive cues alone.
Data availability
Data have been made available via the Open Science Framework platform (https://osf.io/yvmf4/)
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Data from Spatial cell firing during virtual navigation of open arenas by head-restrained miceAvailable via the Open Science Framework.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Wellcome (202805/Z/16/Z)
- Neil Burgess
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (Research and Innovation program 720270)
- Guifen Chen
- Francesca Cacucci
- Neil Burgess
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/I021221/1)
- Francesca Cacucci
H2020 European Research Council (DEVSPACE Starting grant)
- Francesca Cacucci
China Scholarship Council (201509110138)
- Yi Lu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All work was carried out under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and according to Home Office and institutional guidelines.
Copyright
© 2018, Chen 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.
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Spatial cell firing during virtual navigation of open arenas by head-restrained mice
eLife 7:e34789.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34789
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
