Schema cells in the macaque hippocampus.

Abstract

Concept cells in the human hippocampus encode the meaning conveyed by stimuli over their perceptual aspects. Here we investigate whether analogous cells in the macaque can form conceptual schemas of spatial environments. Each day, monkeys were presented with a familiar and a novel virtual maze, sharing a common schema but differing by surface features (landmarks). In both environments, animals searched for a hidden reward goal only defined in relation to landmarks. With learning, many neurons developed a firing map integrating goal-centered and task-related information of the novel maze that matched that for the familiar maze. Thus, these hippocampal cells abstract the spatial concepts from the superficial details of the environment and encode space into a schema-like representation.