Animal survival necessitates adaptive behav-iors in volatile environmental contexts.Virtual reality(VR)technology is instrumental to study the neural mechanisms underlying behaviors modulated by environmental con-text...Animal survival necessitates adaptive behav-iors in volatile environmental contexts.Virtual reality(VR)technology is instrumental to study the neural mechanisms underlying behaviors modulated by environmental con-text by simulating the real world with maximized control of contextual elements.Yet current VR tools for rodents have limited flexibility and performance(e.g.,frame rate)for context-dependent cognitive research.Here,we describe a high-performance VR platform with which to study con-textual behaviors immersed in editable virtual contexts.This platform was assembled from modular hardware and custom-written software with flexibility and upgradability.Using this platform,we trained mice to perform context-dependent cognitive tasks with rules ranging from discrim-ination to delayed-sample-to-match while recording from thousands of hippocampal place cells.By precise manipula-tions of context elements,we found that the context recogni-tion was intact with partial context elements,but impaired by exchanges of context elements.Collectively,our work establishes a configurable VR platform with which to investigate context-dependent cognition with large-scale neural recording.展开更多
基金supported by the National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Major Program(2022ZD0205000)the National Key R&D Program of China,the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(XDB32010105,XDBS01010100)+3 种基金Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project(2018SHZDZX05)Lingang Lab(LG202104-01-08)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(31771180 and 91732106)an International Collaborative Project of the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee(201978677).
文摘Animal survival necessitates adaptive behav-iors in volatile environmental contexts.Virtual reality(VR)technology is instrumental to study the neural mechanisms underlying behaviors modulated by environmental con-text by simulating the real world with maximized control of contextual elements.Yet current VR tools for rodents have limited flexibility and performance(e.g.,frame rate)for context-dependent cognitive research.Here,we describe a high-performance VR platform with which to study con-textual behaviors immersed in editable virtual contexts.This platform was assembled from modular hardware and custom-written software with flexibility and upgradability.Using this platform,we trained mice to perform context-dependent cognitive tasks with rules ranging from discrim-ination to delayed-sample-to-match while recording from thousands of hippocampal place cells.By precise manipula-tions of context elements,we found that the context recogni-tion was intact with partial context elements,but impaired by exchanges of context elements.Collectively,our work establishes a configurable VR platform with which to investigate context-dependent cognition with large-scale neural recording.
