Tatsuno, Masami
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Now showing 1 - 5 of 7
- ItemInteraction of egocentric and world-centered reference frames in the rat posterior parietal cortex(Society for Neuroscience, 2014) Wilber, Aaron A.; Clark, Benjamin J.; Forster, Tyler C.; Tatsuno, Masami; McNaughton, Bruce L.Navigation requires coordination of egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames and may involve vectorial computations relative to landmarks. Creation of are presentation of target heading relative to landmarks could be accomplished from neurons that encode the conjunction of egocentric landmark bearings with allocentric head direction. Landmark vector representations could then be created by combining these cells with distance encoding cells. Landmark vector cells have been identified in rodent hippocampus. Given remembered vectors at go allocations, it would be possible to use such cells to compute trajectories to hidden goals. To look for the first stage in this process, we assessed parietal cortical neuralactivity as a function of egocentric cue light location and allocentric head direction in rats running a random sequence to light locations around a circular platform. We identified cells that exhibit the predicted egocentric-by allocentric conjunctive characteristics and anticipate orienting toward the goal.
- ItemLong-term recordings improve the detection of weak excitatory-excitatory connections in rat prefrontal cortex(Society for Neuroscience, 2014) Schwindel, C. Daniela; Ali, Karim; McNaughton, Bruce L.; Tatsuno, MasamiCharacterization of synaptic connectivity is essential to understanding neural circuit dynamics. For extracellularly recorded spike trains, indirect evidence for connectivity can be inferred from short-latency peaks in the correlogram between two neurons. Despite their predominance in cortex, however, significant interactions between excitatory neurons (E) have been hard to detect because of their intrinsic weakness. By taking advantage of long duration recordings, up to 25 h, from rat prefrontal cortex, we found that 7.6% of the recorded pyramidal neurons are connected. This corresponds to 70% of the local E–E connection probability that has been reported by paired intracellular recordings(11.6%). This value is significantly higher than previous reports from extracellular recordings, but still a substantial underestimate. Our analysis showed that long recording times and strict significance thresholds are necessary to detect weak connections while avoiding false-positive results, but will likely still leave many excitatory connections undetected. In addition, we found that hyper-reciprocity of connections in prefrontal cortex that was shown previously by paired intracellular recordings was only present in short-distance, but not in long distance (300 micrometers or more) interactions. As hyper-reciprocity is restricted to local clusters, it might be a mini columnar effect. Given the current surge of interest in very high-density neural spike recording (e.g., NIH BRAIN Project) it is of paramount importance that we have statistically reliable methods for estimating connectivity from cross-correlation analysis available. We provide an important step in this direction.
- ItemReactivation of rate remapping in CA3(Society for Neuroscience, 2016) Schwindel, C. Daniela; Navratilova, Zaneta; Ali, Karim; Tatsuno, Masami; McNaughton, Bruce L.The hippocampus is thought to contribute to episodic memory by creating, storing, and reactivating patterns that are unique to each experience, including different experiences that happen at the same location. Hippocampus can combine spatial and contextual/episodic information using a dual coding scheme known as “global” and “rate” remapping. Global remapping selects which set of neurons can activate at a given location. Rate remapping readjusts the firing rates of this set depending on current experience, thus expressing experience-unique patterns at each location. But can the experience-unique component be retrieved spontaneously? Whereas reactivation of recent, spatially selective patterns in hippocampus is well established, it is never perfect, raising the issue of whether the experiential component might be absent. This question is key to the hypothesis that hippocampus can assist memory consolidation by reactivating and broadcasting experience-specific “index codes” to neocortex. In CA3, global remapping exhibits attractor-like dynamics, whereas rate remapping apparently does not, leading to the hypothesis that only the former can be retrieved associatively and casting doubt on the general consolidation hypothesis. Therefore, we studied whether the rate component is reactivated spontaneously during sleep. We conducted neural ensemble recordings from CA3 while rats ran on a circular track in different directions (in different sessions) and while they slept. It was shown previously that the two directions of running result in strong rate remapping. During sleep, the most recent rate distribution was reactivated preferentially. Therefore, CA3 can retrieve patterns spontaneously that are unique to both the location and the content of recent experience.
- ItemInformation-geometric measures estimate neural interactions during oscillatory brain states(Frontiers Research Foundation, 2014) Nie, Yimin; Fellous, Jean-Marc; Tatsuno, MasamiThe characterization of functional network structures among multiple neurons is essential to understanding neural information processing. Information geometry (IG),a theory developed for investigating a space of probability distributions has recently been applied to spike-train analysis and has provided robust estimations of neural interactions. Although neural firing in the equilibrium state is often assumed in these studies, in reality, neural activity is non-stationary. The brain exhibits various oscillations depending on cognitive demands or when an animal is asleep. Therefore, the investigation of the IG measures during oscillatory network states is important for testing how the IG method can be applied to real neural data .Using model networks of binary neurons or more realistic spiking neurons, we studied how the single-and pairwise-IG measures were influenced by oscillatory neural activity. Two general oscillatory mechanisms, externally driven oscillations and internally induced oscillations, were considered. In both mechanisms,we found that the single-IG measure was linearly related to the magnitude of the external input, and that the pairwise-IG measure was linearly related to the sum of connection strengths between two neurons. We also observed that the pairwise-IG measure was not dependent on the oscillation frequency. These results are consistent with the previous findings that were obtained under the equilibrium conditions. Therefore,we demonstrate that the IG method provides useful insights into neural interactions under the oscillatory condition that can often be observed in the real brain.
- ItemExperience-dependent firing rate remapping generates directional selectivity in hippocampal place cells(Frontiers Research Foundation, 2012) Navratilova, Zaneta; Hoang, Lan T.; Schwindel, C. Daniela; Tatsuno, Masami; McNaughton, Bruce L.When rodents engage in irregular foraging in an open-field environment, hippocampal principal cells exhibit place-specific firing that is statistically independent of the direction of traverse through the place field. When the path is restricted to a track, however, in-field rates differ substantially in opposite directions. Frequently, the representations of the track in the two directions are essentially orthogonal. We show that this directionally selective firing is not hard-wired, but develops through experience-dependent plasticity. During the rats' first pass in each direction, place fields were highly directionally symmetric, whereas over subsequent laps, the firing rates in the two directions gradually but substantially diverged. We conclude that, even on a restricted track, place cell firing is initially determined by allocentric position, and only later, the within-field firing rates change in response to differential sensory information or behavioral cues in the two directions. In agreement with previous data, place fields near local cues, such as textures on the track, developed less directionality than place fields on a uniform part of the track, possibily because the local cues reduced the net difference in sensory input at a given point. Directionality also developed in an open environment without physical restriction of the animal's path, when rats learned to run along a specified path. In this case, directionality developed later than on the running track, only after the rats began to run in a stereotyped manner. Although the average population firing rates exhibited little if any change over laps in either direction, the direction-specific firing rates in a given place field were up-or-down-regulated with about equal probability and magnitude, which was independent in the two directions, suggesting some form of competitive mechanism (e.g., LTP/LTD) acting coherently on the set of synapses conveying external information to each cell.