Conflicts between Local and Global Spatial Frameworks Dissociate Neural Representations of the Lateral and Medial Entorhinal Cortex

By Joshua P. Neunuebel, D. Yoganarasimha, Geeta Rao, James J. Knierim. 2013

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Manipulation of spatial reference frames is a common experimental tool to investigate the nature of hippocampal information coding and to investigate high-order processes, such as cognitive coordination. However, it is unknown how the hippocampus afferents represent the local and global reference frames of an environment. To address these issues, single units were recorded in freely moving rats with multi-tetrode arrays targeting the superficial layers of the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) and medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), the two primary cortical inputs to the hippocampus. Rats ran clockwise laps around a circular track partitioned into quadrants covered by different textures (the local reference frame). The track was centered in a circular environment with distinct landmarks on the walls (the global reference frame). Here we demonstrate a novel dissociation between MEC and LEC in that the global frame controlled the MEC representation and the local frame controlled the LEC representation when the reference frames were rotated in equal, but opposite, directions. Consideration of the functional anatomy of the hippocampal circuit and popular models of attractor dynamics in CA3 suggests a mechanistic explanation of previous data showing a dissociation between the CA3 and CA1 regions in their responses to this local–global conflict. Furthermore, these results are consistent with a model of the LEC providing the hippocampus with the external sensory content of an experience and the MEC providing the spatial context, which combine to form conjunctive codes in the hippocampus that form the basis of episodic memory.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

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Citations in the corpus

Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, positive): “Slight alterations in environmental cues resulted in dentate activity patterns that were less correlated than those in the entorhinal cortex (Neunuebel et al., 2013; Neunuebel and Knierim, 2014).”
Tracking the Flow of Hippocampal Computation: Pattern Separation, Pattern Completion, and Attractor Dynamics (2015, background): “Adapted from Neunuebel et al. (2013).”
CA3 Retrieves Coherent Representations from Degraded Input: Direct Evidence for CA3 Pattern Completion and Dentate Gyrus Pattern Separation (2014, methodology): “To analyze differences at the neural population level between CA3 and DG in response to the double rotation manipulation, we created spatial correlation matrices from the population firing rate vectors at each location on the track (Figure S4) (Gothard et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2004; Neunuebel et al”
Spatial representations of granule cells and mossy cells of the dentate gyrus (2017, result): “These results may reflect different sensitivities of granule cells to changes in medial or lateral entorhinal inputs (Neunuebel et al., 2013).”