1. Hippocampal theta phases organize the reactivation of large-scale electrophysiological representations during goal-directed navigation
- Author
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Anne Bierbrauer, Peter C. Reinacher, Christian G. Bien, Wenjing Zhou, Shuli Liang, Volker A. Coenen, Andreas Schulze-Bonhage, Philip Grewe, Liang Wang, Armin Brandt, Dong Chen, Matthias Dümpelmann, Tobias Navarro Schröder, Hui Zhang, Nikolai Axmacher, Wen-Xu Wang, Lukas Kunz, and Daniel Lachner-Piza
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Computer science ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,Neurophysiology ,Hippocampal formation ,Spatial memory ,Intracranial Electroencephalography ,Hippocampus ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Humans ,Theta Rhythm ,Research Articles ,030304 developmental biology ,0303 health sciences ,Multidisciplinary ,Epilepsy ,Working memory ,Mechanism (biology) ,SciAdv r-articles ,Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Electrophysiology ,Female ,Mental Navigation Tests ,Scale (map) ,Neuroscience ,Goals ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Research Article ,Spatial Navigation - Abstract
Hippocampal theta cycles provide a means to maintain and segregate different goal representations during human wayfinding., Humans are adept in simultaneously following multiple goals, but the neural mechanisms for maintaining specific goals and distinguishing them from other goals are incompletely understood. For short time scales, working memory studies suggest that multiple mental contents are maintained by theta-coupled reactivation, but evidence for similar mechanisms during complex behaviors such as goal-directed navigation is scarce. We examined intracranial electroencephalography recordings of epilepsy patients performing an object-location memory task in a virtual environment. We report that large-scale electrophysiological representations of objects that cue for specific goal locations are dynamically reactivated during goal-directed navigation. Reactivation of different cue representations occurred at stimulus-specific hippocampal theta phases. Locking to more distinct theta phases predicted better memory performance, identifying hippocampal theta phase coding as a mechanism for separating competing goals. Our findings suggest shared neural mechanisms between working memory and goal-directed navigation and provide new insights into the functions of the hippocampal theta rhythm.
- Published
- 2019