PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bingyu Liu
AU  - Qingyang Tian
AU  - Yong Gu
TI  - Robust vestibular self-motion signals in macaque posterior cingulate region
AID  - 10.1101/2020.11.13.381780
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.11.13.381780
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/15/2020.11.13.381780.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/15/2020.11.13.381780.full
AB  - Self-motion signals, distributed ubiquitously across parietal-temporal lobes, propagate to limbic hippocampal system for vector-based navigation via hubs including posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC). Although numerous studies have indicated that posterior cingulate areas are involved in spatial tasks, it is unclear about how their neurons represent self-motion signals. By providing translation and rotation stimuli to macaques on a 6-degree-of-freedom motion platform, we discovered robust vestibular responses in PCC. A combined 3-dimensional spatiotemporal model captured data well and revealed multiple temporal components including velocity, acceleration, jerk, and position. The former three signals, but not position, conveyed consistent spatial information. Compared to PCC, RSC contained moderate vestibular temporal modulations and lacked significant spatial tuning. Visual self-motion signals were much weaker in both regions compared to the vestibular signals. We conclude that macaque posterior cingulate region carries vestibular-dominant self-motion signals with plentiful temporal components that could be useful for path integration.