ArticleCurrent biology : CB2018
Self-Organized Attractor Dynamics in the Developing Head Direction Circuit.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- A self-organizing developmental framework for the head direction ring attractor.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Months-long stability of the head-direction system.Nature · 2026Article
- Directional dynamics in the entorhinal cortex of male mice driven by behavioral constraints.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Cerebellar control of a unitary head direction sense.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Grid cells, border cells, and discrete complex analysis.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2023Article
- Attractor-like Dynamics in the Subicular Complex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Flexible cue anchoring strategies enable stable head direction coding in both sighted and blind animals.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Postnatal development of thalamic reticular nucleus projections to the anterior thalamic nuclei in rats.European journal of histochemistry : EJH · 2022Article
- A Spiking Neural Network Model of Rodent Head Direction Calibrated With Landmark Free Learning.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- Hippocampus Maintains a Coherent Map Under Reward Feature-Landmark Cue Conflict.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2022Article
- Neural circuits and symbolic processing.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2021Review
- Spiking Neural Networks and Hippocampal Function: A Web-Accessible Survey of Simulations, Modeling Methods, and Underlying Theories.Cognitive systems research · 2021Article
- Unidirectional influence of vision on locomotion in multimodal spatial representations acquired from navigation.Psychological research · 2020Article
- The head direction cell network: attractor dynamics, integration within the navigation system, and three-dimensional properties.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
- The effects of developmental alcohol exposure on the neurobiology of spatial processing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Review
- The intrinsic attractor manifold and population dynamics of a canonical cognitive circuit across waking and sleep.Nature neuroscience · 2019Article
- A Comparison of Neural Decoding Methods and Population Coding Across Thalamo-Cortical Head Direction Cells.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Head direction (HD) cells are neurons found in an extended cortical and subcortical network that signal the orientation of an animal's head relative to its environment [1-3]. They are a fundamental component of the wider circuit of spatially responsive hippocampal formation neurons that make up the neural cognitive map of space [4]. During post-natal development, HD cells are the first among spatially modulated neurons in the hippocampal circuit to exhibit mature firing properties [5, 6], but before eye opening, HD cell responses in rat pups have low directional information and are directionally unstable [7, 8]. Using Bayesian decoding of HD cell ensemble activity recorded in the anterodorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN), we characterize this instability and identify its source: under-signaling of angular head velocity, which incompletely shifts the directional signal in proportion to head turns. We find evidence that geometric cues (the corners of a square environment) can be used to mitigate this under-signaling and, thereby, stabilize the directional signal even before eye opening. Crucially, even when directional firing cannot be stabilized, ensembles of unstable HD cells show short-timescale (1-10 s) temporal and spatial couplings consistent with an adult-like HD network. The HD network is widely modeled as a continuous attractor whose output is one coherent activity peak, updated during movement by angular head velocity signals and anchored by landmark cues [9-11]. Our findings present strong evidence for this model, and they demonstrate that the required network circuitry is in place and functional early during development, independent of reference to landmark information.
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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.