ArticleCurrent biology : CB2017
The Head-Direction Signal Plays a Functional Role as a Neural Compass during Navigation.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 31 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling the journey as well as the destination: a control theory account of rotational navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Rescaling of Distance Judgments With Geometric and Contextual Changes.Hippocampus · 2026Article
- Pathological tau alters head direction signaling and induces spatial disorientation.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Multisensory coding of self-motion and its contribution to navigation.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Angular Head Velocity Cells within Brainstem Nuclei Projecting to the Head Direction Circuit.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Execution of new trajectories toward a stable goal without a functional hippocampus.Hippocampus · 2023Article
- Article
- Cerebellar control of a unitary head direction sense.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Flexible cue anchoring strategies enable stable head direction coding in both sighted and blind animals.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Article
- Spiking Neural Networks and Hippocampal Function: A Web-Accessible Survey of Simulations, Modeling Methods, and Underlying Theories.Cognitive systems research · 2021Article
- Anatomical projections to the dorsal tegmental nucleus and abducens nucleus arise from separate cell populations in the nucleus prepositus hypoglossi, but overlapping cell populations in the medial vestibular nucleus.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2021Article
- The stimulus control of local enclosures and barriers over head direction and place cell spatial firing.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- Association between vestibular function and rotational spatial orientation perception in older adults.Journal of vestibular research : equilibrium & orientation · 2021Article
- LPMP: A Bio-Inspired Model for Visual Localization in Challenging Environments.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2021Article
- Article
- Behavior-dependent directional tuning in the human visual-navigation network.Nature communications · 2020Article
- The head direction cell network: attractor dynamics, integration within the navigation system, and three-dimensional properties.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The rat limbic system contains head direction (HD) cells that fire according to heading in the horizontal plane, and these cells are thought to provide animals with an internal compass. Previous work has found that HD cell tuning correlates with behavior on navigational tasks, but a direct, causal link between HD cells and navigation has not been demonstrated. Here, we show that pathway-specific optogenetic inhibition of the nucleus prepositus caused HD cells to become directionally unstable under dark conditions without affecting the animals' locomotion. Then, using the same technique, we found that this decoupling of the HD signal in the absence of visual cues caused the animals to make directional homing errors and that the magnitude and direction of these errors were in a range that corresponded to the degree of instability observed in the HD signal. These results provide evidence that the HD signal plays a causal role as a neural compass in navigation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.