加拿大麦吉尔大学Roberto A. Gulli研究组发现在虚拟导航过程中，灵长类动物海马体中物体和空间的情境相关表征。2019年12月23日，《自然—神经科学》在线发表了这项成果。
研究人员表示，海马体与联想记忆和空间导航有关。为了研究这些功能在海马体中是如何混合的，他们记录了猕猴的单个海马神经元在觅食任务和情境-物体联想记忆任务中导航虚拟迷宫的过程。在这两个任务中，单个神经元都编码有关空间位置的信息。线性分类器也能够解码位置。但是，空间的群体代码并未在所有任务中推广，特别是在出现与联想记忆任务相关的刺激的地方。单神经元和群体水平的分析表明，跨任务的变化是由于在视觉上可用（感知编码）并在消失后（记忆编码）对联想记忆任务的非空间特征具有选择性。
研究结果表明，灵长类海马体中的神经元以任务依赖的方式非线性地混合了有关环境的空间和非空间元素的信息。这种高效的代码可以灵活地代表独特的感知体验和相应的记忆。
附：英文原文
Title: Context-dependent representations of objects and space in the primate hippocampus during virtual navigation
Author: Roberto A. Gulli, Lyndon R. Duong, Benjamin W. Corrigan, Guillaume Doucet, Sylvain Williams, Stefano Fusi, Julio C. Martinez-Trujillo
Issue&Volume: 2019-12-23
Abstract: The hippocampus is implicated in associative memory and spatial navigation. To investigate how these functions are mixed in the hippocampus, we recorded from single hippocampal neurons in macaque monkeys navigating a virtual maze during a foraging task and a context–object associative memory task. During both tasks, single neurons encoded information about spatial position; a linear classifier also decoded position. However, the population code for space did not generalize across tasks, particularly where stimuli relevant to the associative memory task appeared. Single-neuron and population-level analyses revealed that cross-task changes were due to selectivity for nonspatial features of the associative memory task when they were visually available (perceptual coding) and following their disappearance (mnemonic coding). Our results show that neurons in the primate hippocampus nonlinearly mix information about space and nonspatial elements of the environment in a task-dependent manner; this efficient code flexibly represents unique perceptual experiences and correspondent memories.
DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0548-3
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0548-3
Nature Neuroscience：《自然—神经科学》，创刊于1998年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：28.771
官方网址：https://www.nature.com/neuro/
投稿链接：https://mts-nn.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex
本期文章：《自然—神经科学》：Online/在线发表
