Hippocampal place cells have goal-oriented vector fields during navigation.

ABSTRACT: The hippocampal cognitive map supports navigation towards, or away from, salient locations in familiar environments¹. Although much is known about how the hippocampus encodes location in world-centred coordinates, how it supports flexible navigation is less well understood. We recorded CA1 place cells while rats navigated to a goal on the honeycomb maze². The maze tests navigation via direct and indirect paths to the goal and allows the directionality of place cells to be assessed at each choice point. Place fields showed strong directional polarization characterized by vector fields that converged to sinks distributed throughout the environment. The distribution of these 'convergence sinks' (ConSinks) was centred near the goal location and the population vector field

SUBMITTER: Ormond J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9329099 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature