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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 15, 6260-6270, Copyright © 1995 by Society for Neuroscience
Anticipatory head direction signals in anterior thalamus: evidence for a thalamocortical circuit that integrates angular head motion to compute head direction
HT Blair and PE Sharp
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520- 8205, USA.
Several regions in the rat brain contain neurons known as head- direction
cells, which fire only when the rat's head is facing in a specific
direction. Head-direction cells are influenced only by the direction of the
head with respect to the static environmental surroundings, and not by the
position of the head relative to the body. Each head-direction cell has its
own preferred direction of firing, so that together, the population of
cells provides a continuous signal of momentary directional heading. Here,
head-direction cells were recorded from the post-subicular cortex (PSC) and
anterodorsal nucleus (ADN) of the thalamus of freely moving rats. Cell
activity was analyzed in relation to both momentary head direction, and the
angular velocity of head turns. Head-direction cells in PSC maintained the
same directional firing preference, regardless of the angular head
velocity. By contrast, head-direction cells in ADN systematically shifted
their directional firing preference, as a function of angular head
velocity. The ADN cells always shifted their directional tuning peak to the
left during clockwise head turns, and to the right during counterclockwise
head turns. These results suggest that ADN neurons anticipate the future
direction of the head, whereas PSC neurons encode the present direction of
the head. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that neurons in PSC and
ADN are reciprocally connected to form a thalamocortical circuit, which
computes the directional position of the rat's head by integrating the
angular motion of the head over time.
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