Parahippocampal neurons encode task-relevant information for goal-directed navigation

A behavioral strategy crucial to survival is directed navigation to a goal, such as a food or home location. One potential neural substrate for supporting goal-directed navigation is the parahippocampus, which contains neurons that represent an animal’s position, orientation, and movement through th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:eLife Vol. 12
Main Authors: Gonzalez, Alexander, Giocomo, Lisa M
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 16.02.2024
Subjects:
Animals
Cerebral Cortex
Decision making
entorhinal cortex
Firing pattern
Foraging behavior
goal-directed
Goals
Hippocampus - physiology
navigation
Navigation behavior
Neural coding
Neurons
Neurons - physiology
Orientation behavior
Parahippocampal gyrus
Rats
remapping
spatial coding
Spatial Navigation - physiology
Visual stimuli
goal-directed
navigation
rat
spatial coding
neuroscience
remapping
entorhinal cortex
ISSN:2050-084X, 2050-084X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:A behavioral strategy crucial to survival is directed navigation to a goal, such as a food or home location. One potential neural substrate for supporting goal-directed navigation is the parahippocampus, which contains neurons that represent an animal’s position, orientation, and movement through the world, and that change their firing activity to encode behaviorally relevant variables such as reward. However, little prior work on the parahippocampus has considered how neurons encode variables during goal-directed navigation in environments that dynamically change. Here, we recorded single units from rat parahippocampal cortex while subjects performed a goal-directed task. The maze dynamically changed goal-locations via a visual cue on a trial-to-trial basis, requiring subjects to use cue-location associations to receive reward. We observed a mismatch-like signal, with elevated neural activity on incorrect trials, leading to rate-remapping. The strength of this remapping correlated with task performance. Recordings during open-field foraging allowed us to functionally define navigational coding for a subset of the neurons recorded in the maze. This approach revealed that head-direction coding units remapped more than other functional-defined units. Taken together, this work thus raises the possibility that during goal-directed navigation, parahippocampal neurons encode error information reflective of an animal’s behavioral performance.
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ISSN:2050-084X
2050-084X
DOI:10.7554/eLife.85646