Spatial problem solving and hippocampal place cell firing in rats: control by an internal sense of direction carried across environments (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dissociation of Hippocampal and Striatal Contributions to Spatial Navigation in the Water Maze
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 1996
where the platform was formerly positioned. The results suggest that the hippocampus mediates the allocentric Two experiments were conducted to compare the effects of fornix/fimbria and caudate-putamen lesions in Long -spatial component of the water maze place task while the dorsomedial striatum may play an important role in the Evans hooded rats (Rattus norvegicus) trained on two water maze tasks that differed in the type of spatial local-acquisition of the procedural aspects of both place and cue versions of the task. ᭧ 1996 Academic Press, Inc. ization required for optimum solution. In Experiment 1, the lesioned rats and surgical controls were trained on the standard place task in the water maze (Morris, 1981) and given two postacquisition tests (a platform removal It has been suggested that both the hippocampus probe and platform relocation test). In Experiment 2, rats and dorsal striatum (caudate-putamen) of the rat with similar lesions and control rats were trained on a make important contributions to spatially organized modified cue navigation task. Fornix/fimbria lesions imbehavior, albeit in different ways. The hippocampus paired a late stage of place task acquisition but did not has been hypothesized to be the neural substrate for impair acquisition of the cue task. Caudate-putamen lesions resulted in a severe place acquisition impairment allocentric spatial localization (i.e., cognitive mapand a transient cue acquisition impairment, both of ping; O' Keefe & Nadel, 1978), whereas the caudate which were characterized by an initial tendency to swim nucleus has been hypothesized to play a critical role near the wall of the pool. Post-hoc analyses of the direcin egocentric spatial orientation (Kesner & DiMattion and angles of departure from the start points sug- tia, 1987; Potegal, , 1982. gested that rats with fornix/fimbria lesions used non-allo-O' Keefe and Nadel's (1978) theory is supported by centric spatial strategies to solve the place task. These the finding that damage to the hippocampal system rats also demonstrated a significantly weakened spatial results in impairments on tasks that require the use bias for the former training quadrant on the platform of the relations between ambient distal stimuli to removal probe and reduced flexibility in navigating to a locate a particular goal in space. One such task is novel platform location on the platform relocation test.
Hippocampus, 2011
To ask if the properties of spatial learning supported by the hippocampus are distinct from the properties of conditioning, we conducted a blocking-like experiment in which the measured variable was not a conditioned response but rather the ability of a novel visual stimulus to control the location of place cell firing fields after being briefly combined with a familiar, salient stimulus to form a compound stimulus. For most rats, we found that rotations of the novel stimulus on the wall of a cylindrical recording chamber produced equal rotations of firing fields, whether exposure to the compound stimulus lasted 10 min or 60 min. Thus, there was little indication that the blocking phenomenon acted to prevent the rapid inclusion of a new stimulus into a previously experienced cue constellation. This result is in agreement with the finding of Doeller and Burgess (2008) that blocking is seen for landmark stimuli inside an arena but not for boundary stimuli that circumscribe the arena. We conclude that the rules governing incidental spatial learning are different for the hippocampal representation of a rat's environment than for conditioning. V V C 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Spatial cognition and neuro-mimetic navigation: a model of hippocampal place cell activity
Biological Cybernetics, 2000
A computational model of hippocampal activity during spatial cognition and navigation tasks is presented. The spatial representation in our model of the rat hippocampus is built on-line during exploration via two processing streams. An allothetic vision-based representation is built by unsupervised Hebbian learning extracting spatio-temporal properties of the environment from visual input. An idiothetic representation is learned based on internal movement-related information provided by path integration. On the level of the hippocampus, allothetic and idiothetic representations are integrated to yield a stable representation of the environment by a population of localized overlapping CA3-CA1 place fields. The hippocampal spatial representation is used as a basis for goal-oriented spatial behavior. We focus on the neural pathway connecting the hippocampus to the nucleus accumbens. Place cells drive a population of locomotor action neurons in the nucleus accumbens. Reward-based learning is applied to map place cell activity into action cell activity. The ensemble action cell activity provides navigational maps to support spatial behavior. We present experimental results obtained with a mobile Khepera robot.
Place-related neural responses in the monkey hippocampal formation in a virtual space
Hippocampus, 2005
Place cells in the rodent hippocampal formation (HF) are suggested to be the neural substrate for a spatial cognitive map. This specific spatial property of the place cells are regulated by both allothetic cues (i.e., intramaze local and distal cues) as well as idiothetic sensory inputs; the context signaled by the distal cues allows local and idiothetic cues to be employed for spatial tuning within the maze. To investigate the effects of distal cues on place-related activity of primate HF neurons, 228 neurons were recorded from the monkey HF during virtual navigation in a similar situation to a rodent water maze, in which distal cues were important to locate the animal's position. A subset of 72 neurons displayed place-related activity in one or more virtual spaces. Most place-related responses disappeared or changed their spatial tuning (i.e., remapping) when the arrangements of the distal cues were altered/moved in the virtual spaces. These specific features of the monkey HF might underlie neurophysiological bases of human episodic memory. V
Neuroscience, 2003
Although extensive behavioral studies have demonstrated that hippocampal lesions impair navigation toward specific places, the role of hippocampal neuronal activity in the development of efficient navigation during place learning remains unknown. The aim of the present study was to investigate how hippocampal neuronal activity changes as rats learn to navigate efficiently to acquire rewards in an open field. Rats were pre-trained in a random reward task where intracranial self-stimulation rewards were provided at random locations. Then, the rats were trained in a novel place task where they were rewarded at two specific locations as they repeatedly shuttled between them. Hippocampal neuronal activity was recorded during the course of learning of the place task. The rats learned reward sites within several sessions, and gradually developed efficient navigation strategies throughout the learning sessions. Some hippocampal neurons gradually changed spatial firing as the learning proceeded, and discharged robustly near the reward sites when efficient navigation was established. Over the learning sessions, the neuronal activity was highly correlated to formation of efficient shuttling trajectories between the reward sites. At the end of the experiment, spatial firing patterns of the hippocampal neurons were reexamined in the random reward task. The specific spatial firing patterns of the neurons were preserved if the rats navigated, as if they expected to find rewards at the previously valid locations. However, those specific spatial firing patterns were not observed in rats pursuing random trajectories. These results suggest that hippocampal neurons have a crucial role in formation of an efficient navigation.
Rats Use Hippocampus to Recognize Positions of Objects Located in an Inaccessible Space
Rat hippocampus plays a crucial role in many spatial tasks, including recognition of position of objects, which can be approached and explored. Whether hippocampus is also necessary for recognizing positions of objects located in an inaccessible part of the environment remains unclear. To address this question, we conditioned rats to press a lever when an object displayed on a distant computer screen was in a particular position (''reward position'') and not to press the lever when the object was in other positions (''nonreward positions''). After the rats had reached an asymptotic performance, the role of the dorsal hippocampus was assessed by blocking its activity with muscimol. The rats without functional dorsal hippocampus did not discriminate the reward position from the nonreward positions. Then the same rats were trained to discriminate light and dark conditions. The hippocampal inactivation did not disrupt the ability to discriminate these two conditions. It indicated that the inactivation itself had no major effect on the operant behavior and its control by visual stimuli. We conclude that rats use dorsal hippocampus for recognizing positions of objects located in an inaccessible part of the environment. V V C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). HIPPOCAMPUS 23:153-161 (2013) V V C 2012 WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.
A feed-forward model of spatial and directional selectivity of hippocampal place cells
In recent years a wealth of studies have focused on the role of the Hippocampus in spatial learning and navigation, triggered by the finding of place sensitive cells in this area. These cells have been interpreted as being responsible for coding a representation of space [9, 10]. Even though the term place cell suggests that location is the unique determinant of firing of hippocampal cells, there exist several other factors which influence hippocampal activity.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 2000
This study identified sources of map orientation critical for successful spatial problem solving by rats of a plus maze embedded in water. Disorientation slowed, but it did not prevent acquisition of goal location. Use of a circular enclosure with multiple points of entry prevented reliable goal location. A single entry point enabled the rats to locate a fixed goal. A cue array within the enclosure was ineffective in providing orientation. These data suggest that stable map orientation can be derived from entry location when enclosure geometry is uninformative, but is not readily taken from cue arrays. They further suggest that map orientation is reset when rats enter an enclosure.
Behavioral Neuroscience, 2007
Hippocampal damage impairs navigation with respect to information provided by the shape of an arena. Recent evidence has suggested that normal rats use local geometric information, as opposed to a global geometric representation, to navigate to a correct corner. One implication of this pattern of results is that hippocampal lesions may impair processing of 1 or more of the local geometric features of an environment. The authors therefore investigated the effects of hippocampal cell loss in rats on navigation to a hidden goal with respect to a variety of local cues in an environment with a distinctive shape. Rats with lesions of the hippocampus were impaired in discriminating a right-angled corner from its mirror image. However, they were able to use cues provided by an acute-angled corner (Experiment 1) or a local polarizing cue (Experiment 2). In contrast, lesioned rats were impaired in discriminating long versus short walls (Experiment 3). Results indicate that the hippocampus plays a role in disambiguating locations by processing (metric) information related to the distance between corners.
Task-dependent representations in rat hippocampal place neurons
Journal of neurophysiology, 1997
It is suggested that the hippocampal formation is essential to spatial representations by flexible encoding of diverse information during navigation, which includes not only externally generated sensory information such as visual and auditory sensation but also ideothetic information concerning locomotion (i.e., internally generated information such as proprioceptive and vestibular sensation) as well as information concerning reward. In the present study, we investigated how various types of information are represented in the hippocampal formation, by recording hippocampal complex-spike cells from rats that performed three types of place learning tasks in a circular open field with the use of intracranial self-stimulation as reward. The intracranial self-stimulation reward was delivered in the following three contexts: if the rat 1) entered an experimenter-determined reward place within the open field, and this place was randomly varied in sequential trials; 2) entered two specific ...