scholarly journals Spatial selectivity of rat hippocampal neurons: dependence on preparedness for movement

Science ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 244 (4912) ◽  
pp. 1580-1582 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Foster ◽  
C. Castro ◽  
B. McNaughton
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason J Moore ◽  
Jesse D Cushman ◽  
Lavanya Acharya ◽  
Mayank R Mehta

ABSTRACTThe hippocampus is implicated in episodic memory and allocentric spatial navigation. However, spatial selectivity is insufficient to navigate; one needs information about the distance and direction to the reward on a specific journey. The nature of these representations, whether they are expressed in an episodic-like sequence, and their relationship with navigational performance are unknown. We recorded single units from dorsal CA1 of the hippocampus while rats navigated to an unmarked reward zone defined solely by distal visual cues, similar to the classic water maze. The allocentric spatial selectivity was substantially weaker than in typical real world tasks, despite excellent navigational performance. Instead, the majority of cells encoded path distance from the start of trials. Cells also encoded the rat’s allocentric position and head angle. Often the same cells multiplexed and encoded path distance, head direction and allocentric position in a sequence, thus encoding a journey-specific episode. The strength of neural activity and tuning strongly correlated with performance, with a temporal relationship indicating neural responses influencing behavior and vice versa. Consistent with computational models of associative Hebbian learning, neural responses showed increasing clustering and became better predictors of behaviorally relevant variables, with neurometric curves exceeding and converging to psychometric curves. These findings demonstrate that hippocampal neurons multiplex and exhibit highly plastic, task- and experience-dependent tuning to path-centric and allocentric variables to form an episode, which could mediate navigation.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Aghajan ◽  
Lavanya Acharya ◽  
Jesse Cushman ◽  
Cliff Vuong ◽  
Jason Moore ◽  
...  

Dorsal Hippocampal neurons provide an allocentric map of space, characterized by three key properties. First, their firing is spatially selective, termed a rate code. Second, as animals traverse through place fields, neurons sustain elevated firing rates for long periods, however this has received little attention. Third the theta-phase of spikes within this sustained activity varies with animal's location, termed phase-precession or a temporal code. The precise relationship between these properties and the mechanisms governing them are not understood, although distal visual cues (DVC) are thought to be sufficient to reliably elicit them. Hence, we measured rat CA1 neurons' activity during random foraging in two-dimensional VR—where only DVC provide consistent allocentric location information— and compared it with their activity in real world (RW). Surprisingly, we found little spatial selectivity in VR. This is in sharp contrast to robust spatial selectivity commonly seen in one-dimensional RW and VR, or two-dimensional RW. Despite this, neurons in VR generated approximately two-second long phase precessing spike sequences, termed “hippocampal motifs”. Motifs, and “Motif-fields”, an aggregation of all motifs of a neuron, had qualitatively similar properties including theta-scale temporal coding in RW and VR, but the motifs were far less spatially localized in VR. These results suggest that intrinsic, network mechanisms generate temporally coded hippocampal motifs, which can be dissociated from their spatial selectivity. Further, DVC alone are insufficient to localize motifs spatially to generate a robust rate code.


10.1038/72910 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Knierim ◽  
Bruce L. McNaughton ◽  
Gina R. Poe

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (8) ◽  
pp. S74-S74
Author(s):  
Tingyu Li ◽  
Xiaojuan Zhang ◽  
Xuan Zhang ◽  
Jian Hea ◽  
Yang Bi Youxue Liu ◽  
...  

1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-310
Author(s):  
Yukihiko Kohda ◽  
Katsuhiro Tsuchiya ◽  
Junkoh Yamashita ◽  
Masaki Yoshida ◽  
Takashi Ueno ◽  
...  

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara L. Essmann ◽  
Inmaculada Segura ◽  
Stefan Weinges ◽  
Amparo Acker-Palmer
Keyword(s):  

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