Mapping of a non-spatial dimension by the hippocampal/entorhinal circuit

By D. Aronov, Rhino Nevers, David W. Tank. Nature, 2017

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During spatial navigation, neural activity in the hippocampus and the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) is correlated to navigational variables such as location, head direction, speed, and proximity to boundaries. These activity patterns are thought to provide a map-like representation of physical space. However, the hippocampal–entorhinal circuit is involved not only in spatial navigation, but also in a variety of memory-guided behaviours. The relationship between this general function and the specialized spatial activity patterns is unclear. A conceptual framework reconciling these views is that spatial representation is just one example of a more general mechanism for encoding continuous, task-relevant variables. Here we tested this idea by recording from hippocampal and entorhinal neurons during a task that required rats to use a joystick to manipulate sound along a continuous frequency axis. We found neural representation of the entire behavioural task, including activity that formed discrete firing fields at particular sound frequencies. Neurons involved in this representation overlapped with the known spatial cell types in the circuit, such as place cells and grid cells. These results suggest that common circuit mechanisms in the hippocampal–entorhinal system are used to represent diverse behavioural tasks, possibly supporting cognitive processes beyond spatial navigation.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/adc8255afb2906812bbbeed8129b4edc75aff35e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Consistent with this idea, it appears that the brain can use grid and place cells interchangebly when navigating through either the spatial environment or through non-spatial cognitive domains [78, 79, 80].”
Multi-sensory gamma stimulation ameliorates Alzheimer’s-associated pathology and improves cognition. (2019, background): “Although there is extensive evidence that CA1 and mPFC neurons can respond to sensory cues including auditory stimuli (Aronov et al., 2017; Mears et al., 2006; Miller and Freedman, 1995), we show for the first time that 40 Hz auditory, or A+V, stimulation elicits small but significant firing rate en”
Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, background): “In a sound modulation task, rats manipulated the frequency of an auditory stimulus to “navigate” to a target frequency (71).”
Learning Structures: Predictive Representations, Replay, and Generalization (2020, background): “For instance, inconsistent with merely spatial structures, place and grid fields capture non-spatial state spaces as well [7 ,8,9].”
A dedicated population for reward coding in the hippocampus (2018, neutral): “These associated features create a fundamental ambiguity: alterations to hippocampal activity might simply reflect the constellation of sensorimotor events near the goal (Deshmukh and Knierim, 2013; Deadwyler and Hampson, 2004; Aronov et al., 2017) rather than serving to identify the goal itself.”