Event:

Planning a journey to a goal destination requires representation of the future goal, knowledge about current location, and a spatial map where the relative geometry between the current and future location is preserved. While neurons in the hippocampus and parahippocampal regions provide estimates of the animal’s current position as well as nearby trajectories, a specific neural code of the remote navigational goals remains to be identified. Hence, we hypothesized that the future goal location may be represented by a parallel spatial representation mechanism outside the hippocampal-entorhinal system, like the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which has been implicated in representing decisions in non-spatial tasks. To test our hypothesis, we designed a linear track with multiple reward sites, in which rats were trained to alternate between two given sites to obtain rewards. After few successful alternations, the reward sites are changed to new locations, thereby ensuring continuous update of goal representation. As rats performed this task, we simultaneously recorded the activity of hundreds of OFC neurons. Analysis of the neural activity revealed that OFC neurons form a spatial map of the environment, discriminating the different reward locations on the maze during navigation, while preserving their relative spatial geometry. The activity of OFC neurons encodes animal’s positions during reward consumption, but before the onset of journey, these neurons exhibit a representational transition from the animal’s current position to the subsequent goal, which is kept during the entire journey until the animal reaches the destination. Further analysis revealed that this persistent goal representation is maintained by destination specific neural trajectories that are predefined at navigation onset and embedded within underlying neural dynamics which evolve along the animal’s trajectory towards the goal. Finally, optogenetic perturbation of OFC neurons, specifically at the navigation onset, caused animals to navigate to an incorrect destination, pointing to OFC as part of the brain’s internal map representing the animal’s decision of navigational goals.

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https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/97222494242?pwd=UldoUkwyb0NYTHREMjgwbEdtN2VKUT09

Meeting ID: 972 2249 4242
Passcode: 578667