Bo Zhang, Jia Liu. The spatial periodic computation of hippocampus-entorhinal circuit in navigation. bioRxiv 2022.01.29.478346; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.29.478346

Summary
“To achieve the computational goal of navigating in both physical and mental spaces, human brain employs a cognitive map constructed by the global metrics of the entorhinal cortex and the local locations of the hippocampus. However, how these two regions work collaboratively in navigation remains unclear. Here, we designed an object-matching task where human participants unknowingly manipulated object variants arranged in a ring-like structure around a central prototype. Functional MRI revealed a 3-fold spatial periodicity of hippocampal activity, which tracked the navigation path from the original object variants to the central prototype in the object space. Importantly, this spatial periodicity of the hippocampus was phase-locked with the well-documented 6-fold periodicity of the entorhinal cortex, suggesting a periodic scaffold connecting these two regions. In addition, a 3-fold periodicity was found embedded in human behavior, which fluctuated as a function of the navigation path and phase-locked with hippocampal activity. Finally, we proposed an E-H PhaseSync model to illustrate that the spatial periodicity originated from the population activity of entorhinal grid cells may serve as a scaffold in the hippocampal-entorhinal network, where hippocampal vector fields emerge as the neural basis for utilizing the cognitive map in navigation.”

Bo Zhang, Jia Liu. The spatial periodic computation of hippocampus-entorhinal circuit in navigation. bioRxiv 2022.01.29.478346; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.29.478346