ABSTRACT: The hippocampus is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is believed to involve voluntarily drawing from hippocampal memory representations of people, events, and places, including the hippocampus’ map-like representations of familiar environments. However, whether representations in such “cognitive maps” can be volitionally accessed is unknown. We developed a brain-machine interface to test if rats can do so by controlling their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, and model-based manner. We found that rats can efficiently navigate or direct objects to arbitrary goal locations within a virtual reality arena solely by activating and sustaining appropriate hippocampal representations of remote places. This provides insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation/planning, and imagination, and opens up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics utilizing hippocampal representations.
https://www.albertleeneuro.org/
BIDMC