Abstract
Place cells were recorded from five animals performing a shuttle task on a linear track in which reward was only available at one end of the journey. Although place fields during the journey itself were directional, place fields at the turn-around point were bidirectional. Place fields that were directional on full-length journeys became locally bidirectional when the animal turned around in the middle of the place field. This suggests that place cells show an inertia-like process in which, once they begin firing, they continue firing whatever trajectory the animal takes. This process would be useful for storing routes and sequences. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 235-241 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Neurocomputing |
| Volume | 32-33 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2000 |
| Event | The 8th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS'99) - Pittsburgh, PA, USA Duration: Jul 18 1999 → Jul 22 1999 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Joe Bohanick, Sam Dedios, Kim Hardesty, Nathan Insel, Jeri Meltzer, Karen Weaver-Sommers, and Joyce Yuan for help in running the experiments and Jason Gerrard and Ephron Rosenzweig for helpful discussions and help with the experiments. This work was supported by NIH grants AG15085, AG12609, MH01565, MH01227, and NS20331.
Keywords
- Cognitive maps
- Directional place cells
- Hippocampus
- Spatial reasoning