We often use familiar landmarks to help us navigate, while traveling through a street and as we think to ourselves, “OK, now make a left at the coffee shop,” a part of the brain region called the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) lights up. A new study from MIT neuroscientists now reveals how neurons in the RSC use both visual and spatial information to encode specific landmarks.
“There’s a synthesis of some of these signals — visual inputs and body motion — to represent concepts like landmarks,” says Mark Harnett, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “What we went after in this study is the neuron-level and population-level representation of these different aspects of spatial navigation.”
In a study of mice, the researchers found that RSC creates a “landmark code” by combining visual information about the surrounding environment (primary visual cortex) with spatial feedback of the mice’s own position along a track (motor cortex). Integrating these two sources of information from the primary visual cortex and the motor cortex allowed the mice to learn where to find a reward, based on landmarks that they saw.
In this study, the MIT team set out to analyze the behavior of individual RSC neurons in mice, including how they integrate multiple inputs that help with navigation. To do that, they created a virtual reality environment for the mice by allowing them to run on a treadmill while they watch a video screen that makes it appear they are running along a track. The speed of the video is determined by how fast the mice run.
At specific points along the track, landmarks appear, signaling that there’s a reward available a certain distance beyond the landmark. The mice had to learn to distinguish between two different landmarks, and to learn how far beyond each one they had to run to get the reward.
Once the mice learned the task, the researchers recorded neural activity in the RSC as the animals ran along the virtual track. They were able to record from a few hundred neurons at a time, and found that most of them anchored their activity to a specific aspect of the task.
Most of those neurons responded to both of the landmarks, but a small subset responded to only one or the other. The researchers hypothesize that those strongly selective neurons help the mice to distinguish between the landmarks and run the correct distance to get the reward. When the researchers used optogenetics (a tool that can turn off neuron activity) to block activity in the RSC, the mice’s performance on the task became much worse.
The researchers now plan to analyze data that they have already collected on how neuron activity evolves over time as the mice learn the task. They also hope to perform further experiments in which they could try to separately measure visual and spatial inputs into different locations within RSC neurons.
Source: MIT News
Article: bioRxiv
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