H2020Индивидуална стипендия2016–2018

VisNav · Vision and Navigation in Mouse Cortex

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2016-05-01 → 2018-04-30
Финансиране от ЕС: 195 455 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Накратко на български

Невроните във визуалната кора на мишките се изследват за това дали предават информация за позицията на животното, а не само за визуалните обекти около него. Това помага да се разбере как мозъкът съчетава зрението и пространствената ориентация за създаване на вътрешни карти.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Vision and Navigation in Mouse Cortex

When an animal navigates in an environment, it uses its sense of position to find its way. In the brain, this sense of position relies on neurons located in the hippocampus. Each of these neurons is activated selectively when the animal is in a particular position in the environment. Together, these neurons form a map of the environment and report the position of the animal on this map. To construct its spatial map, the hippocampus relies on multiple cues, and key among these cues are visual landmarks. The hippocampus, thus, must give special weight to visual information, which is processed by the visual cortex. Visual cortex and other sensory areas of the cortex, in turn are classically thought to provide the hippocampus with purely sensory information, independently of the animal’s position in the environment. In recent years, recordings in awake mice showed that neurons in visual cortex are modulated by non-visual factors such as the run speed of the animal. These results made us hypothesize that visual cortex neurons may not simply analyze the visual scene according to local visual features but also carry information about the position of the animal.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

One of the main functions of the visual system is to help the animal navigate through its environment, and one of the main ways that animals navigate is by using visual landmarks. Visually-guided navigation requires a change of coordinates from an eye-centered to a world-centered representation of the external environment. We know much about the two ends of this transformation, i.e. about the visual selectivity of neurons in Primary visual cortex and the place selectivity of place cells in hippocampus CA1. However, little is known about how this transition happens along the way. The recent development of virtual reality environment might help filling this gap: mice can navigate through an artificial environment while their head is fixed, therefore enabling a careful monitoring of the animal behavior, accurate control of the displayed visual inputs and the stability of the recording. In this project, we propose to investigate the transition from an eye-centered to a world-centered representation across the successive visual areas of the mouse cortex. Using a combination of electrophysiological and imaging techniques, we will record simultaneously in hippocampus CA1 and in different visual cortical areas while head-fixed mice navigate through a virtual maze to get a reward at specific locations. We will also take advantage of the virtual reality setup to modify visual cues and navigational cues such as to estimate the nature of the modulation of visually driven responses by navigational information. This approach will help understand how visual processing in cortical areas is modulated by the animal’s position in the environment. We believe that it will also set the foundations for a new field of research that investigates the function of the visual cortex as part of the navigation system rather than a simple feature analyzer of the visual scene.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON · LondonКоординаторОбединеното кралство