The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish
In mammals, the so-called “seat of the cognitive map” is located in place cells within the hippocampus. Recent work suggests that the shape of place cell fields might be defined by the animals’ natural movement; in rats the fields appear to be laterally compressed (meaning that the spatial map of th...
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| Format: | Online |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2016
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4781870/ |
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pubmed-47818702016-03-24 The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish Burt de Perera, Theresa Holbrook, Robert I. Davis, Victoria Neuroscience In mammals, the so-called “seat of the cognitive map” is located in place cells within the hippocampus. Recent work suggests that the shape of place cell fields might be defined by the animals’ natural movement; in rats the fields appear to be laterally compressed (meaning that the spatial map of the animal is more highly resolved in the horizontal dimensions than in the vertical), whereas the place cell fields of bats are statistically spherical (which should result in a spatial map that is equally resolved in all three dimensions). It follows that navigational error should be equal in the horizontal and vertical dimensions in animals that travel freely through volumes, whereas in surface-bound animals would demonstrate greater vertical error. Here, we describe behavioral experiments on pelagic fish in which we investigated the way that fish encode three-dimensional space and we make inferences about the underlying processing. Our work suggests that fish, like mammals, have a higher order representation of space that assembles incoming sensory information into a neural unit that can be used to determine position and heading in three-dimensions. Further, our results are consistent with this representation being encoded isotropically, as would be expected for animals that move freely through volumes. Definitive evidence for spherical place fields in fish will not only reveal the neural correlates of space to be a deep seated vertebrate trait, but will also help address the questions of the degree to which environment spatial ecology has shaped cognitive processes and their underlying neural mechanisms. Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-03-08 /pmc/articles/PMC4781870/ /pubmed/27014002 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00040 Text en Copyright © 2016 Burt de Perera, Holbrook and Davis. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Burt de Perera, Theresa Holbrook, Robert I. Davis, Victoria |
| spellingShingle |
Burt de Perera, Theresa Holbrook, Robert I. Davis, Victoria The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| author_facet |
Burt de Perera, Theresa Holbrook, Robert I. Davis, Victoria |
| author_sort |
Burt de Perera, Theresa |
| title |
The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| title_short |
The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| title_full |
The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| title_fullStr |
The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| title_full_unstemmed |
The Representation of Three-Dimensional Space in Fish |
| title_sort |
representation of three-dimensional space in fish |
| description |
In mammals, the so-called “seat of the cognitive map” is located in place cells within the hippocampus. Recent work suggests that the shape of place cell fields might be defined by the animals’ natural movement; in rats the fields appear to be laterally compressed (meaning that the spatial map of the animal is more highly resolved in the horizontal dimensions than in the vertical), whereas the place cell fields of bats are statistically spherical (which should result in a spatial map that is equally resolved in all three dimensions). It follows that navigational error should be equal in the horizontal and vertical dimensions in animals that travel freely through volumes, whereas in surface-bound animals would demonstrate greater vertical error. Here, we describe behavioral experiments on pelagic fish in which we investigated the way that fish encode three-dimensional space and we make inferences about the underlying processing. Our work suggests that fish, like mammals, have a higher order representation of space that assembles incoming sensory information into a neural unit that can be used to determine position and heading in three-dimensions. Further, our results are consistent with this representation being encoded isotropically, as would be expected for animals that move freely through volumes. Definitive evidence for spherical place fields in fish will not only reveal the neural correlates of space to be a deep seated vertebrate trait, but will also help address the questions of the degree to which environment spatial ecology has shaped cognitive processes and their underlying neural mechanisms. |
| publisher |
Frontiers Media S.A. |
| publishDate |
2016 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4781870/ |
| _version_ |
1613548479260393472 |