Visual cue-related activity of cells in the medial entorhinal cortex during navigation in virtual reality
Abstract
During spatial navigation, animals use self-motion to estimate positions through path integration. However, estimation errors accumulate over time and it is unclear how they are corrected. Here we report a new cell class ('cue cell') encoding visual cues that could be used to correct errors in path integration in mouse medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). During virtual navigation, individual cue cells exhibited firing fields only near visual cues and their population response formed sequences repeated at each cue. These cells consistently responded to cues across multiple environments. On a track with cues on left and right sides, most cue cells only responded to cues on one side. During navigation in a real arena, they showed spatially stable activity and accounted for 32% of unidentified, spatially stable MEC cells. These cue cell properties demonstrate that the MEC contains a code representing spatial landmarks, which could be important for error correction during path integration.
Additional Information
© 2020 Kinkhabwala et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. Received: 26 October 2018; Accepted: 06 March 2020; Published: 09 March 2020. We thank current and former members of the Tank lab, Ila Fiete, and Anika Kinkhabwala for helpful discussions, and Jeffrey Santner and Alexander Riordan for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by NINDS Grant 5R37NS081242 (DWT), NIMH Grant 5R01MH083686 (DWT), NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant F32NS070514-01A1 (AAK). Author contributions: Amina A Kinkhabwala, Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Validation, Investigation, Visualization, Methodology; Yi Gu, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization; Dmitriy Aronov, Conceptualization, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Methodology; David W Tank, Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Validation, Investigation, Methodology. The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics: Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the Princeton University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC protocol# 1910-15) and were in compliance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Data availability: All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.Attached Files
Published - elife-43140-v2.pdf
Submitted - 453787.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - elife-43140-supp-v1.zip
Supplemental Material - elife-43140-transrepform-v2.pdf
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 90479
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20181029-151552539
- 5R37NS081242
- NIH
- 5R01MH083686
- NIH
- F32NS070514-01A1
- NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Created
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2018-10-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-06-02Created from EPrint's last_modified field