Social animals have to know the spatial positions of conspecifics. However, it is unknown how the position of others is represented in the brain. We designed a spatial observational-learning task, in which an observer bat mimicked a demonstrator bat while we recorded hippocampal dorsal-CA1 neurons from the observer bat. A neuronal subpopulation represented the position of the other bat, in allocentric coordinates. About half of these "social place-cells" represented also the observer's own position-that is, were place cells. The representation of the demonstrator bat did not reflect self-movement or trajectory planning by the observer. Some neurons represented also the position of inanimate moving objects; however, their representation differed from the representation of the demonstrator bat. This suggests a role for hippocampal CA1 neurons in social-spatial cognition.

Pyramidal cells in layers 2 and 3 of the neocortex of many species collectively form a clustered system of lateral axonal projections (the superficial patch system—Lund JS, Angelucci A, Bressloff PC. 2003. Anatomical substrates for functional columns in macaque monkey primary visual cortex. Cereb Cortex. 13:15–24. or daisy architecture—Douglas RJ, Martin KAC. 2004. Neuronal circuits of the neocortex. Annu Rev Neurosci. 27:419–451.), but the function performed by this general feature of the cortical architecture remains obscure. By comparing the spatial configuration of labeled patches with the configuration of responses to drifting grating stimuli, we found the spatial organizations both of the patch system and of the cortical response to be highly conserved between cat and monkey primary visual cortex. More importantly, the configuration of the superficial patch system is directly reflected in the arrangement of function across monkey primary visual cortex. Our results indicate a close relationship between the structure of the superficial patch system and cortical responses encoding a single value across the surface of visual cortex (self-consistent states). This relationship is consistent with the spontaneous emergence of orientation response–like activity patterns during ongoing cortical activity (Kenet T, Bibitchkov D, Tsodyks M, Grinvald A, Arieli A. 2003. Spontaneously emerging cortical representations of visual attributes. Nature. 425:954–956.). We conclude that the superficial patch system is the physical encoding of self-consistent cortical states, and that a set of concurrently labeled patches participate in a network of mutually consistent representations of cortical input.

The ultimate goal of high-resolution functional brain mapping is single-condition (stimulus versus no-stimulus maps) rather than differential imaging (comparing two "stimulus maps"), because the appropriate ("orthogonal") stimuli are rarely available. This requires some component(s) of activity-dependent hemodynamic signals to closely colocalize with electrical activity, like the early increase in deoxyhemoglobin, shown previously to yield high-quality functional single-condition maps. Conversely, nonlocal vascular responses dominate in cerebral blood volume (CBV)-based single-condition maps. Differential CBV maps are largely restricted to the parenchyma, implying that part of the CBV response does colocalize with electrical activity at fine spatial scale. By removing surface vascular activation from optical imaging data, we document the existence of a capillary CBV response component, regulated at fine spatial scale and yielding single-condition maps exhibiting approximately 100 microm resolution. Blood volume and -flow based single-condition functional mapping at columnar level should thus be feasible, provided that the capillary response component is selectively imaged.

No abstract

No abstract