Establishing the Boundaries: The Hippocampal Contribution to Imagining Scenes
Establishing the Boundaries: The Hippocampal Contribution to Imagining Scenes
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DOI：
10.1523/jneurosci.0723-10.2010
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发表时间：
2010-09-01
影响因子：
5.3
通讯作者：
Burgess, Neil
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bird, Chris M.;Capponi, Corinne;Burgess, Neil
当我们想象场景时，无论是过去的场景还是虚构的场景，我们都会为自己的“心灵之眼”强加一个观点，并从这个观点中体验到空间上连贯的结果图像。海马体参与了这一过程，但其具体作用尚不清楚。我们基于大鼠海马体形成中神经元的空间放电特性测试了一个特定的假设，即该区域通过代表我们视点周围环境边界的位置来支持空间连贯的心理图像的构建。使用功能性磁共振成像，我们发现海马的激活随着想象场景中封闭边界的数量而参数化地增加。相比之下，海马体活动不受场景复杂性的非空间操作的调节，也不受场景想象难度的增加的调节。我们的发现确定了海马体在心理意象和情景回忆中的特定计算作用。
When we visualize scenes, either from our own past or invented, we impose a viewpoint for our "mind's eye" and we experience the resulting image as spatially coherent from that viewpoint. The hippocampus has been implicated in this process, but its precise contribution is unknown. We tested a specific hypothesis based on the spatial firing properties of neurons in the hippocampal formation of rats, that this region supports the construction of spatially coherent mental images by representing the locations of the environmental boundaries surrounding our viewpoint. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that hippocampal activation increases parametrically with the number of enclosing boundaries in the imagined scene. In contrast, hippocampal activity is not modulated by a nonspatial manipulation of scene complexity nor to increasing difficulty of imagining the scenes in general. Our findings identify a specific computational role for the hippocampus in mental imagery and episodic recollection.