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Environment geometry alters subiculum boundary vector cell receptive fields in adulthood and early development.

ABSTRACT: Boundaries to movement form a specific class of landmark information used for navigation: Boundary Vector Cells (BVCs) are neurons which encode an animal's location as a vector displacement from boundaries. Here we characterise the prevalence and spatial tuning of subiculum BVCs in adult and developing male rats, and investigate the relationship between BVC spatial firing and boundary geometry. BVC directional tunings align with environment walls in squares, but are uniformly distributed in circles, demonstrating that environmental geometry alters BVC receptive fields. Inserted barriers uncover both excitatory and inhibitory components to BVC receptive fields, demonstrating that inhibitory inputs contribute to BVC field formation. During post-natal development, subiculum BVCs mature slowly, contrasting with the earlier maturation of boundary-responsive cells in upstream Entorhinal Cortex. However, Subiculum and Entorhinal BVC receptive fields are altered by boundary geometry as early as tested, suggesting this is an inherent feature of the hippocampal representation of space.

SUBMITTER: Muessig L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10834499 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Environment geometry alters subiculum boundary vector cell receptive fields in adulthood and early development.

Muessig Laurenz L Ribeiro Rodrigues Fabio F Bjerknes Tale L TL Towse Benjamin W BW Barry Caswell C Burgess Neil N Moser Edvard I EI Moser May-Britt MB Cacucci Francesca F Wills Thomas J TJ

Nature communications 20240201 1

Boundaries to movement form a specific class of landmark information used for navigation: Boundary Vector Cells (BVCs) are neurons which encode an animal's location as a vector displacement from boundaries. Here we characterise the prevalence and spatial tuning of subiculum BVCs in adult and developing male rats, and investigate the relationship between BVC spatial firing and boundary geometry. BVC directional tunings align with environment walls in squares, but are uniformly distributed in circ ...[more]

PMID: 38302455

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Project description:BackgroundA classification image (CI) technique has shown that static luminance noise near visually completed contours affects the discrimination of fat and thin Kanizsa shapes. These influential noise regions were proposed to reveal "behavioral receptive fields" of completed contours-the same regions to which early cortical cells respond in neurophysiological studies of contour completion. Here, we hypothesized that 1) influential noise regions correspond to the surfaces that distinguish fat and thin shapes (hereafter, key regions); and 2) key region noise biases a "fat" response to the extent that its contrast polarity (lighter or darker than background) matches the shape's filled-in surface color.ResultsTo test our hypothesis, we had observers discriminate fat and thin noise-embedded rectangles that were defined by either illusory or luminance-defined contours (Experiment 1). Surrounding elements ("inducers") caused the shapes to appear either lighter or darker than the background-a process sometimes referred to as lightness induction. For both illusory and luminance-defined rectangles, key region noise biased a fat response to the extent that its contrast polarity (light or dark) matched the induced surface color. When lightness induction was minimized, luminance noise had no consistent influence on shape discrimination. This pattern arose when pixels immediately adjacent to the discriminated boundaries were excluded from the analysis (Experiment 2) and also when the noise was restricted to the key regions so that the noise never overlapped with the physically visible edges (Experiment 3). The lightness effects did not occur in the absence of enclosing boundaries (Experiment 4).ConclusionsUnder noisy conditions, lightness induction alters visually completed shape. Moreover, behavioral receptive fields derived in CI studies do not correspond to contours per se but to filled-in surface regions contained by those contours. The relevance of lightness to two-dimensional shape completion supplies a new constraint for models of object perception.

Project description:Previous studies have shown that the auditory cortex can enhance the perception of behaviorally important sounds in the presence of background noise, but the mechanisms by which it does this are not yet elucidated. Rapid plasticity of spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) in the primary (A1) cortical neurons is observed during behavioral tasks that require discrimination of particular sounds. This rapid task-related change is believed to be one of the processing strategies utilized by the auditory cortex to selectively attend to one stream of sound in the presence of mixed sounds. However, the mechanism by which the brain evokes this rapid plasticity in the auditory cortex remains unclear. This paper uses a neural network model to investigate how synaptic transmission within the cortical neuron network can change the receptive fields of individual neurons. A sound signal was used as input to a model of the cochlea and auditory periphery, which activated or inhibited integrate-and-fire neuron models to represent networks in the primary auditory cortex. Each neuron in the network was tuned to a different frequency. All neurons were interconnected with excitatory or inhibitory synapses of varying strengths. Action potentials in one of the model neurons were used to calculate the receptive field using reverse correlation. The results were directly compared to previously recorded electrophysiological data from ferrets performing behavioral tasks that require discrimination of particular sounds. The neural network model could reproduce complex STRFs observed experimentally through optimizing the synaptic weights in the model. The model predicts that altering synaptic drive between cortical neurons and/or bottom-up synaptic drive from the cochlear model to the cortical neurons can account for rapid task-related changes observed experimentally in A1 neurons. By identifying changes in the synaptic drive during behavioral tasks, the model provides insights into the neural mechanisms utilized by the auditory cortex to enhance the perception of behaviorally salient sounds.

Dataset Information

Environment geometry alters subiculum boundary vector cell receptive fields in adulthood and early development.

Publications

Environment geometry alters subiculum boundary vector cell receptive fields in adulthood and early development.

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