Lesions of the Head Direction Cell System Increase Hippocampal Place Field Repetition.

ABSTRACT: A central tenet of systems neuroscience is that the mammalian hippocampus provides a cognitive map of the environment. This view is supported by the finding of place cells, neurons whose firing is tuned to specific locations in an animal's environment, within this brain region. Recent work, however, has shown that these cells repeat their firing fields across visually identical maze compartments [1, 2]. This repetition is not observed if these compartments face different directions, suggesting that place cells use a directional input to differentiate otherwise similar local environments [3, 4]. A clear candidate for this input is the head direction cell system. To test this, we disrupted the head direction cell system by lesioning the lateral mammillary nuclei and then recorded place cells

SUBMITTER: Harland B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5607353 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature