Place cells on a maze encode routes rather than destinations

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Abstract

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.

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Roddy M Grieves

School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Emma R Wood

Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Paul A Dudchenko

School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

For correspondence
p.a.dudchenko@stir.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This experiment complied with the national [Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986, United 372 Kingdom] and international [European Communities Council Directive of November 24, 1986 (86/609/EEC)] legislation governing the maintenance of laboratory animals and their use in scientific experiments.

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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.