Aktif lokomosyon, başı sabitlenmiş farelerde baş yönü çekici dinamiklerini öngörerek kurtarır

Özet (abstract)

Abstract Head direction (HD) cells in the anterodorsal thalamic nucleus form the brain’s internal compass, and are often modeled as a ring attractor maintaining azimuth coding by leveraging continuous visual and inertial sensory input. Here, we test how the common experimental preparation of head-fixed animals alters this code. Complete head-fixation that creates vestibular conflict disrupts both unit and population encoding of head direction, while selectively constraining head-on-body movements either in real or virtual reality uniquely impairs HD population activity. More specifically, attractor dynamics are altered in head-restrained male mice during periods of immobility, and a computational model recapitulates this effect by perturbing lateral connectivity among HD neurons. These dynamics recover several hundred milliseconds prior to locomotion onset, suggesting that an efference copy or prediction of a re-afferent signal is necessary to maintain HD network activity during head restraint. More generally, the results indicate that the HD network is a context- and state-dependent predictive estimator, stabilized by forthcoming self-motion signals. The classic ring-attractor models should be revised to integrate context-dependent dynamics with prospective motor signals, offering a more complete account of how the brain’s compass remains stable across both naturalistic and constrained conditions.

Yazarların özeti; kaynağından alınmıştır. Nature Communications, 2026 · DOI ↗