Abstract
Spatial navigation and the firing of hippocampal place cells can be driven as much by what an animal knows about its spatial world as by what it immediately experiences at a given location. If presented first with a set of spatially orienting cues, which are then removed during a test, navigation to a place of reward is accurate and place cells still fire in their correct locations despite the absence of the controlling cues (O’Keefe & Speakman, 1987). Similarly, as reported here, place fields are disrupted in a familiar room in darkness if the animal is not shown its starting location, but remain intact in darkness if the starting location is known to the animal. A minimal computational model is presented to account for these results. The hypothesis proposes that conditional associations between places and movements are established during learning about an environment. Given a known starting location, these compound movement/place representations can be used to recall a sequence of target locations on the basis of the corresponding movement sequences alone. Recordings of posterior parietal neurons in rats performing a radial maze task reveal that this cortical region contains cells that are selective for specific combinations of environmental spatial features and motion states. The proposed model suggests how these compound movement/place representations could be combined with hippocampal spatial representations to account for the “blind” navigation phenomena described above. The model may also help us to understand the reasons for segregation of mammalian visual information processing into parietal and inf erotemporal streams as described by Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982).
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Mcnaughton, B.L., Leonard, B. & Chen, L. Cortical-hippocampal interactions and cognitive mapping: A hypothesis based on reintegration of the parietal and inferotemporal pathways for visual processing. Psychobiology 17, 230–235 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03337774
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03337774