Neural dynamics for landmark orientation and angular path integration

By Johannes D. Seelig, V. Jayaraman. Nature, 2015

688 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many animals navigate using a combination of visual landmarks and path integration. In mammalian brains, head direction cells integrate these two streams of information by representing an animal's heading relative to landmarks, yet maintaining their directional tuning in darkness based on self-motion cues. Here we use two-photon calcium imaging in head-fixed Drosophila melanogaster walking on a ball in a virtual reality arena to demonstrate that landmark-based orientation and angular path integration are combined in the population responses of neurons whose dendrites tile the ellipsoid body, a toroidal structure in the centre of the fly brain. The neural population encodes the fly's azimuth relative to its environment, tracking visual landmarks when available and relying on self-motion cues in darkness. When both visual and self-motion cues are absent, a representation of the animal's orientation is maintained in this network through persistent activity, a potential substrate for short-term memory. Several features of the population dynamics of these neurons and their circular anatomical arrangement are suggestive of ring attractors, network structures that have been proposed to support the function of navigational brain circuits.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42791e105af37aab7d2e3144e23619e3731bfa0a

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Citations in the corpus

The frontiers of insect cognition (2017, background): “Taking together the evidence from bees and flies, neural correlates of attentional processes have been found in almost all of the regions of the insect brain involved in visual processing and learning: mushroom bodies, central complex, anterior optic tubercle, lobula and medulla [22 ,27,28,29 ,30], ”
Insects have the capacity for subjective experience (2016, background): “This has been demonstrated for both honey bees (Apis mellifera) and Drosophila (Paulk et al., 2014; Sareen, Wolf, & Heisenberg, 2011; van Swinderen, 2005; van Swinderen & Greenspan, 2003) in which the neural representation of the environment is both subjective and egocentric.”
A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection (2020, background): “We began by assuming that the EPG neurons have an activity bump, similar to that observed experimentally (Seelig and Jayaraman, 2015).”
Manifold GPLVMs for discovering non-Euclidean latent structure in neural data (2020, methodology): “, 2020), where the so-called E-PG neurons have recently been shown to encode head direction (Seelig and Jayaraman, 2015).”
Fast animal pose estimation using deep neural networks (2018, background): “This will probably be useful for tracking body parts of head-fixed animals moving on an air-supported treadmill with simultaneous neural recording 44,45 .”