Using walls to navigate the room: egocentric representations of borders for spatial navigation
Authors:   , van Wijngaarden Joeri 
Published: May 2023

Spatial navigation forms one of the core components of an animal’s behavioural repertoire. Good navigational skills boost survival by allowing one to avoid predators, to search successfully for food in an unpredictable world, and to be able to find a mating partner. As a consequence, the brain has dedicated many of its resources to the processing of spatial information. Decades of seminal work has revealed how the brain is able to form detailed representations of one’s current position, and use an internal cognitive map of the environment to traverse the local space. However, what is much less understood is how neural computations of position depend on distance information of salient external locations such as landmarks, and how these distal places are encoded in the brain. The work in this thesis explores the role of one brain region in particular, the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), as a key area to implement distance computations in relation to distal landmarks. Previous research has shown that damage to the RSC results in losses of spatial memory and navigation ability, but its exact role in spatial cognition remains unclear. Initial electrophysiological recordings of single cells in the RSC during free exploration behaviour of the animal resulted in the discovery of a new population of neurons that robustly encode distance information towards nearby walls throughout the environment. Activity of these border cells was characterized by high firing rates near all boundaries of the arena that were available to the animal, and sensory manipulation experiments revealed that this activity persisted in the absence of direct visual or somatosensory detection of the wall. It quickly became apparent that border cell activity was not only modulated by the distance to walls, but was contingent on the direction the animal was facing relative to the boundary. Approximately 40% of neurons displayed significant selectivity to the direction of walls, mostly in the hemifield contra-lateral to the recorded hemisphere, such that a neuron in left RSC is active whenever a wall occupies proximal space on the right side of the animal. Using a cue-rotation paradigm, experiments initially showed that this egocentric direction information was invariant to the physical rotation of the arena. Yet this rotation elicited a corresponding shift in the preferred direction of local head-direction cells, as well as a rotation in the firing fields of spatially-tuned cells in RSC. As a consequence, position and direction encoding in RSC must be bound together, rotating in unison during the environmental manipulations, as information about allocentric boundary locations is integrated with head-direction signals to form egocentric border representations. It is known that the RSC forms many anatomical connections with other parts of the brain that encode spatial information, like the hippocampus and para-hippocampal areas. The next step was to establish the circuit mechanisms in place for RSC neurons to generate their activity in respect to the distance and direction of walls. A series of inactivation experiments revealed how RSC activity is inter-dependent with one of its communication partners, the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). Together they form a wider functional network that encodes precise spatial information of borders, with information flowing from the MEC to RSC but not vice versa. While the conjunction between distance and heading direction relative to the outer walls was the main driver of neural activity in RSC, border cells displayed further behavioural correlates related to movement trajectories. Spiking activity in either hemisphere tended to precede turning behaviour on a short time-scale in a way that border cells in the right RSC anticipated right-way turns ~300 ms into the future. The interpretation of these results is that the RSC’s primary role in spatial cognition is not necessarily on the early sensory processing stage as suggested by previous studies. Instead, it is involved in computations related to the generation of motion plans, using spatial information that is processed in other brain areas to plan and execute future actions. One potential function of the RSC’s role in this process could be to act correctly in relation to the nearby perimeter, such that border cells in one hemisphere are involved in the encoding of walls in the contralateral hemifield, after which the animal makes an ipsilateral turn to avoid collision. Together this supports the idea that the MEC→RSC pathway links the encoding of space and position in the hippocampal system with the brain’s motor action systems, allowing animals to use walls as prominent landmarks to navigate the room.