Single-unit hippocampal recordings in 21 adult epilepsy patients performing a joystick-controlled virtual prey-pursuit task, tracking neural coding of self-avatar, chosen prey, unchosen prey, predator, and gaze positions simultaneously to understand how the hippocampus separates yet generalizes across spatial reference frames.
~30% of 726 hippocampal neurons tracked self-position, ~26% tracked chosen prey, ~19% unchosen prey, and ~33% of a subset tracked predator position; neural codes occupied semi-orthogonal but linearly transformable subspaces (self→chosen prey linear R²=0.40, cross-validated R²=0.29); cross-condition generalization (CCGP) showed a left/right classifier trained on self-activity transferred to chosen prey (CCGP=0.73) and gaze (CCGP=0.79), confirming abstraction across agents and viewpoints.
- Third-person virtual view and joystick-only movement lack vestibular/optic flow cues, limiting direct translation to real-world navigation and traditional place cell comparisons. - Gaze data were collected in only 6 of 21 patients, reducing statistical power for gaze-specific subspace analyses. - Recordings were in epilepsy patients with intracranial electrodes; generalizability to healthy hippocampal function is uncertain.
These findings are basic-science in nature and not directly actionable for clinical practice, but they deepen understanding of how the hippocampus simultaneously tracks multiple agents—relevant to interpreting hippocampal dysfunction in disorders affecting social cognition and spatial navigation.
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