News Release

UCI scientists identify important aspect of the brain's navigational system

Study identifies how rodents process and reactivate spatial information

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of California - Irvine

The ability to successfully navigate in the environment is essential both for animals searching for food or escaping predators, as well as for human urban dwellers. It is something we take for granted, but under the hood, it is supported by still incompletely understood brain networks that continuously calculate our position in the environment. Moreover, the location where certain experience occurred is an indispensable building block of memory.

In the study, which appears in the September issue of the journal Neuron, the team led by Bruce McNaughton, UCI distinguished professor of neurobiology and behavior at the Ayala School of Biological Sciences, presents the findings that improve our understanding of the brain's ability to tell how fast and in which direction our location is changing.

"The parietal cortex is part of the brain that processes visual and other sensory information in order to continuously update the speed and direction of movement", said Dr. Ivan Skelin, co-first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge and the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Ayala School of Biological Sciences.

"In this study, we found that there is a division of work between large groups of cells, or modules, each being active when the experimental rat's speed/direction were in a certain range [e.g. 10-20 cm/sec and heading north-east]."

Based solely on the activity of these cell modules, researchers were able to predict animal speed and direction with high accuracy. The newly acquired knowledge of where and how this information is organized in the brain is a potentially useful guidance for the development of brain-machine interfaces, which are already helping paralyzed people interact with the environment using their thoughts.

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Other researchers who contributed to this work were Aaron Wilber and Wei Wu from Florida State University. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Alberta Innovates - Health Solutions.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 30,000 students and offers 192 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $5 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit http://www.uci.edu.

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