Activities of visual cortical and hippocampal neurons co-fluctuate in freely moving rats during spatial navigation
Abstract
Visual cues exert a powerful control over hippocampal place cell activities that encode external spaces. The functional interaction of visual cortical neurons and hippocampal place cells during spatial navigation behavior has yet to be elucidated. Here we show that, like hippocampal place cells, many neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of freely moving rats selectively fire at specific locations as animals run repeatedly on a track. The V1 location-specific activity leads hippocampal place cell activity both spatially and temporally. The precise activities of individual V1 neurons fluctuate every time the animal travels through the track, in a correlated fashion with those of hippocampal place cells firing at overlapping locations. The results suggest the existence of visual cortical neurons that are functionally coupled with hippocampal place cells for spatial processing during natural behavior. These visual neurons may also participate in the formation and storage of hippocampal-dependent memories.
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Animal experimentation: The experimental procedures in this study were approved by the Institutional Committee on Animal Care at Baylor College of Medicine (Protocol #5134) and followed National Institutes of Health guidelines.
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© 2015, Haggerty & Ji
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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