Hippocampal spatial representations supporting path integration

路径整合是一种简单的导航形式，在此过程中，智能体整合自运动线索，如线速度和角速度，以保持其相对于起点的位置。病变研究表明，海马体对路径整合至关重要。然而，我们对海马体在路径整合中的作用的理解仍然有限，因为海马体活动从未在参与路径整合任务的自由运动动物中被记录。在前期工作中，我们开发了一种新的路径整合任务，适用于空间选择神经元的并发记录。在这个项目中，我们希望为路径整合的研究建立这种新的行为范式，并在自由运动小鼠的路径整合任务中提供海马体表征的第一个特征。我们假设海马体神经元在任务中编码起始位置的矢量表示。此外，我们将进行光遗传学实验来证实海马体对新路径整合任务的表现准确性至关重要。

Path integration is a simple form of navigation during which an agent integrates self-motion cues, such as linear and angular velocity, to keep track of its position relative to a starting point. Lesion studies indicate that the hippocampus is essential for path integration. Our understanding of the role of the hippocampus in path integration, however, has remained limited because hippocampal activity has never been recorded in freely moving animals engaged in a path integration task. In preliminary work, we have developed a new path integration task suitable for concurrent recording of spatially selective neurons. In this project, we want to firmly establish this new behavioral paradigm for the study of path integration and provide a first characterization of the hippocampal representation during a path integration task in freely moving mice. We hypothesize that hippocampal neurons encode a vectorial representation of the starting location during the task. In addition, we will perform optogenetic experiments to confirm that the hippocampus is essential to performance accuracy on the new path integration task.