Kadjita Asumbisa, Adrien Peyrache, Stuart Trenholm. Flexible cue anchoring strategies enable stable head direction coding in both sighted and blind animals. bioRxiv 2022.01.12.476111 doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.12.476111

Abstract
“Vision plays a crucial role in instructing the brain’s spatial navigation systems. However, little is known about how vision loss affects the neuronal encoding of spatial information. Here, recording from head direction (HD) cells in the anterior dorsal nucleus of the thalamus in mice, we find stable and robust HD tuning in blind animals. In contrast, placing sighted animals in darkness significantly impairs HD cell tuning. We find that blind mice use olfactory cues to maintain stable HD tuning and that prior visual experience leads to refined HD cell tuning in blind adult mice compared to congenitally blind animals. Finally, in the absence of both visual and olfactory cues, the HD attractor network remains intact but the preferred firing direction of HD cells continuously drifts over time. We thus demonstrate remarkable flexibility in how the brain uses diverse sensory information to generate a stable directional representation of space.”

Kadjita Asumbisa, Adrien Peyrache, Stuart Trenholm. Flexible cue anchoring strategies enable stable head direction coding in both sighted and blind animals. bioRxiv 2022.01.12.476111 doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.12.476111