Place cells on a maze encode routes rather than destinations.
Hippocampal place cells fire at different rates when a rodent runs through a given location on its way to different destinations. However, it is unclear whether such firing represents the animal's intended destination or the execution of a specific trajectory. To distinguish between these possibilities, Lister Hooded rats (n = 8) were trained to navigate from a start box to three goal locations via four partially overlapping routes. Two of these led to the same goal location. Of the cells that fired on these two routes, 95.8% showed route-dependent firing (firing on only one route), whereas only two cells (4.2%) showed goal-dependent firing (firing similarly on both routes). In addition, route-dependent place cells over-represented the less discriminable routes, and place cells in general over-represented the start location. These results indicate that place cell firing on overlapping routes reflects the animal's route, not its goals, and that this firing may aid spatial discrimination.
School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom.|Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Roddy M
RM
Grieves
Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Emma R
ER
Wood
School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom.|Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Paul A
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1531-5713
PA
Dudchenko
D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology*; D008124:Locomotion; D000072458:Orientation, Spatial; D000071037:Place Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats
hippocampus; neuroscience; place cells; rat; spatial memory; trajectory encoding